Je raffole de l'école!

Cassandra does not want to go home from school. She stays after the nice teacher leaves. She stays while the janitor with a tattoo mops the floors. She stays after the slightly scary principal turns off all the lights and goes home. She plays with the clay and reads until after dark, when her mom and dad realize she is missing and come in a panic to take her home.

The next day, Cassandra gets up, eats breakfast, gets on her bike and heads off to school — but it is Saturday and all the doors and windows are locked. So on her way back home she stops by the store and places an order.

The next day she looks out the window to find her purchase has been delivered — there is a brand-new red-brick school with a nice teacher, a slightly scary principal, and a janitor with tattoos in her very own backyard, so she can have school any time she likes!

This story was written for Cassandra, a girl from Pickering, Ontario who said that the most interesting thing about her was that she LOVED school!

Telling stories is what Robert Munsch does — and loves best. From the first time he stood in front of a group of children as a student teacher at a nursery school in 1972, his jaunty, animated presentation grabbed hold of the imaginations of his listeners and he hasn't let go since.

Before he puts a story to paper, Munsch spends up to three years telling, revising and fine-tuning the tale in front of his rapt audiences. “I figured out once that the stories the kids kept requesting came to two percent of my total output,” he says. But once he discovered how to capture the spontaneity of his narratives in written form, he was on his way to being a successful and sought-after author.

Munsch has published dozens of books in both Canada and the United States. His first efforts, Mud Puddle and The Dark, were published in 1979 and the runaway bestseller Love You Forever was first published in 1986. All of his characters are believably spunky, stubborn and endearing children, while his story lines tend to challenge conventions and stereotypes.

Munsch describes his stories as “middle of the road taboo.” When he uses words like pee and underwear, “the kids go absolutely bananas.” As for the parents, “Eighty percent think it's really neat; the other twenty percent ask, 'How could you?'"

Robert Munsch lives in Ontario, Canada, and continues to perform his own tales — often without advance notice — for day care centers, schools, and libraries.