Duck Days

Finished October 31 

Duck Days by Sara Leach, illustrations by Rebecca Bender

This book continues the story of Lauren, now in third grade and learning how to cope with visiting a friend's house where there might be different routines and foods. Lauren is on the autism spectrum and has various tools she uses to cope when she is feeling stressed in situations. Some of them we learned about in previous books she featured in, some are new here. 

She uses four square breathing to calm herself and her father talks to her about going with the flow. When she is faced with a challenging situation at school, she gets taught a new tool by one of her classmates, which is being like a duck and allowing comments by others to flow off her back. 

Lauren learns about what it means to be brave, and how she can have more than one friend. I like to see how Lauren grows from book to book and becomes more confident in her abilities and tackles new challenges with the help of her family, friends, and teachers. As always with this series, the illustrations show both the events of the story as well as Lauren's feelings. The facial expressions really work well to show how she feels in different situations here.