Bill Canterbury’s 2025 picture book My Teacher is a Dinosaur! is fun. It starts with brief scenes common to kid experience: teachers and their strange habits. The first few work on a smaller scale, and are realistic, but they lead easily to the larger one that is the book’s focus, and gives it its title: a teacher who is a dinosaur, specifically a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
This leads easily into scene that engage immediately, before the text or any suggested action. Readers get a T Rex in the classroom, a T Rex looming over kids, and so on.
There’s some roaring, then more comparison with other classes/teachers, who go boring places on their field trip and have educational and orderly times. Not this class, not with a T Rex in charge. They go to Dinosaur Land, where their teacher feels quite at home, knows everything, and creates mass destruction.
Jeff Harter’s art provides cartoonish but well-designed scenes to bring the action to life, along with some kid-art drawings on the classroom walls.
The resolution felt a bit quick–and a bit forced–but otherwise, a fun book for those just entering school.
