By Margaret Wise Brown
A little sentence that repeats, about a spoon and an apple and the rain, and then, on the last page, about your child.
It starts with a spoon. The important thing about a spoon, the book says, is that you eat with it. Then it tells you the rest: a spoon is flat, it's hollow, it scoops things up. And then it comes right back around to where it started, but the important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it. Next a daisy. Then rain, and grass, and snow, and an apple, and the wind, and the sky, and a shoe. Every page works the same way. It names the thing, says a few true things about it, and returns to the first one. On the last page it turns to your child: the important thing about you is that you are you.
The pattern is so plain that a child who's heard it twice has already got it, and once they've got it they can pour anything in: a grandmother, the dog, a rainy Tuesday. That's the reason it turns up on so many classroom walls. It hands a child who freezes at a blank page a ready-made first line and last line, and only asks them to fill the middle, which was never the part they were stuck on. Weisgard's flat, bright colors date from 1949 and still look modern. And it's short enough to read in one sitting.