Follow the Butterflies! Ten Magic Butterflies by Danica McKellar

Once upon a time, there were ten flower friends.

They loved being flowers, but they couldn't deny
that they had a secret desire to fly!

They couldn't help noticing the fairies who flew about their garden, not moored to the ground, but flitting about in the air freely. At last one brave flower, weary with being a stick-in-the-mud, asks a friendly fairy what to do.

"Time to get ready for a big surprise!" said the fairy.

And as fast as she could say BOO, the flower was one butterfly--and she was blue!

And we're off on another of Danica McKellar's board books for toddler mathematicians, a concept book which combines mini-lessons in counting and colors for tots. Little girls in particular love butterflies: they're easy to draw and they come in almost any color available in their crayon boxes, and author McKellar, famous for her advocacy of mathematics for girls, makes good use of this popular image to teach numeration.

With the artwork of Jennifer Bricking, one by one, the flowers magically become butterflies of different colors and fill the air in the garden, in McKellar's third counting book in her board book trilogy, Ten Magic Butterflies (Crown Books, 2018). It's a sunny, funny way to begin math lessons, with a tempting message that mathematics has its own special magic, and kids can count on McKellar to give it wings.

Says Booklist, "A similarly simple, quiet feel as Margaret Wise Brown's iconic Goodnight Moon... there is a lot to count on."

Danica McKellar's earlier best-selling counting books include Bathtime Mathtime and Goodnight, Numbers (see McKellar's math book reviews here)