Concepts A-Board! Numbers Colors Shapes by Roger Priddy

ONE BOAT

TWO RABBITS

THREE BEARS

FOUR DINOSAURS

It's a counting book, counting up to TEN (count 'em) FISH!

But turn the next page and... there are all kinds of colored things! There is an ORANGE carrot and a parrot... and more. And then comes YELLOW ducklings, one banana, and a lemon! And don't forget good old GREEN--leaves, frogs, and grapes. And iconic colors are included: there are PINK flamingos and piglets and BLUE skies and socks!

And then it is time to move on to some basic shapes--squares (like a sandwich) and circles, of course, and then ovals (cf. an egg), stars and diamonds (like a kite).

But there's more than the those standard concepts in Roger Priddy's top-selling padded board book for preschoolers, Numbers Colors Shapes (First 100) (St. Martin's Press/Priddy Books).  Priddy even takes on emotions and feelings, giving a name to youngsters for SAD, HAPPY, HOT,  and COLD .  The author even ventures into concepts such as TIME and PLACE, rounding out this popular concept and vocabulary-building little board book, mixing colorful illustrations and photographs, making this one a concept book that grows from crib to Kindergarten days, especially if bundled with Priddy's hit First 100 companion books, First 100 Words and First 100 Animals.

What Spots? Lucy Ladybug by Sharon King Chai

LUCY LADYBUG DIDN'T FEEL SHE BELONGED ANYWHERE.

"YOU CAN'T BE ONE OF US," CRIED THE OTHER LADYBUGS. "YOU HAVE NO SPOTS."

They're right! She doesn't! Lucy flies away, all alone.

Soon she sees Fred Frog and admires his beautiful green spots.

"YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, TOO," SAYS FRED. "HAVE ONE OF MINE!"

With one green spot, Lucy flies away, feeling better.

Then in the fall she sees Carla Caterpillar and admires her lovely golden spots, and Carla returns the compliment and contributes a gold spot for Lucy's carapace. Lucy loves her twin spots.

But that winter Lucy spots Felicity Fish, leaping from the icy lake and showing off her sparkling blue spots. She cooperates in donating one dazzling blue dot to Lucy's collection.

And when spring has sprung, Lucy can't help but comment on Bella Bird's breast, decorated by dazzling white speckles. Bella obliges by offering Lucy a sample spot!

LUCY LADYBUG WAS SO HAPPY! FOUR SPOTS!

Proudly Lucy spreads her wings and proudly gets ready to come in for a landing at opening day to show off her big bright beautifully colored spots! But... Wait! All the other ladybugs have black spots. Is she still the odd ladybug out?

But in Sharon King Chai's Lucy Ladybug (Random House, 2016), the author-illustrator saves the best for last, a big, bold and bright four-page gatefold in which Lucy Ladybug proudly proclaims...

BEING DIFFERENT IS ACTUALLY ... A GOOD THING!

In a super-sweet story of the virtue of being unique, Chai manages to work in mini-lessons in color recognition, numbers, and the cycle of the seasons, all within an easy-going little parable that salutes individuality along with the value of getting by with a little help from your friends.

NO Respect! The Hueys in None the Number: A Counting Adventure by Oliver Jeffers

"HOW MANY DO YOU SEE HERE?"

"I DON'T SEE ANY!"

"THAT'S BECAUSE THERE ARE NONE!"

"IS NONE A NUMBER?"

"OF COURSE. IT IS ONE LESS THAN ONE!"

SO ONE MORE THAN NONE...IS ONE?

When is nothing really SOMETHING?

In mathematics, of course! We owe a lot to that nebulous quantity--the zero, a.k.a. nothing, nada, zip, zed, the naughty naught, without which we'd be stuck with calculating in Roman numerals! (Shudder!)

Ever since Saturday morning television introduced OUR HERO ZERO, even elementary students have known something about the powers of  the mighty naught. After all, without the zero, one could never become 10, or 100, or 1000, or, well, you get the idea. Essential for arithmetical computation and of course for higher mathematics, our hero zero still gets short shrift in preschool counting books.

But that's where Oliver Jeffers' notable Hueys come to the rescue, in his latest, None the Number: A Hueys Book (The Hueys) (Philomel Books, 2014). Jeffers' ovoid characters take on different colors to explain some of the uses of the aught or naught or zero,  a figure of many names. Jeffers' simple stick figures count up a variety of things, (Kevin's four tantrums, Rupert's five hats, nine seagulls trying to snatch Frankie's hot dog), with Blue Huey always maintaining that it SHOULD all begin with nothing!

O123456789!

Jeffers' art is notably quirky and eye-catching, and here his Huey characters stand out, along with his colorful numbers, against bright white pages, to make the point that counting should begin with that zero! Endpapers provide Jeffers' quicky lesson in  that mighty integer, the zero.  School Library Journal gives it one thumb up, saying, "Delightfully droll and enlightening, the unconventional Jeffers reveals the importance of the number zero."

Along with lauded picture books such as the best-selling The Day the Crayons Quit and Stuck, Jeffers' earlier Huey books include The Hueys in the New Sweater and It Wasn't Me: The Hueys, Book 2.

At Your Fingertips: Press Here by Herve' Tullet

READY?

PRESS HERE AND TURN THE PAGE.

At a touch of the forefinger and a flip of the sturdy page, the one yellow dot has become two.

Who could stop now?

Another firm press and the two become three. Then a gentle rub on the one on the left and presto! The yellow dot on the left is now a RED dot. Well done! Now, an equally gentle rub on the yellow dot on the right and...it is now BLUE. Three dots, Red, Yellow, Blue, now await the next command.

Five quick taps on the yellow button brings a new vista: three rows of five dots, one yellow, one red, one yellow. one blue. Perfect!

But wait, there's more. Shake the book and you get a random arrangement over a double-page spread. Tilt the book and the dots slide to the top, to the bottom, and from side to side of the two pages. Wipe the page and the following double page is black.

No problem. Press all the dots and the lights come back on. Clap your hands--not too loud!

WHOO-HOO! KEEP CLAPPING!

Herve Tullet's innovative Press Here (Chronicle Books 2011) has snowballed into a runaway best-seller since its publication earlier this year. A deceptively simple-appearing board book with thick bright pages ornamented with a series of almost round dots which take on a life of their own, proving that flat pages which inspire the imagination can be truly interactive, while achieving a conceptual sophistication which teaches both number sets and color along the way. As recent picture books have shown, the genre is far from dead, taking elements freely from electronic media and going them one better! It's not MAGIC. It's a BOOK!

"Without so much as a single tab to pull or flap to turn, this might be the most interactive picture book of the year," said Booklist in its review.

For a glimpse of the magic, see the book's trailer here.

Pre-K Primer: Everything I Need to Know Before I'm Five by Valerie Fisher

Every once in a while the right book comes along at the right time. Just in time for the first day of Kindergarten we have Valerie Fisher's brand-new Everything I Need to Know Before I'm Five (Schwartz & Wade, 2011) which promises "Everything I Need to Learn Before Kindergarten" in one volume. And it does cover those basic skills--numbers up to 20, upper and lower case letters, colors, shapes, weather words, seasons, and opposites--that Kindergarten brings.

Fisher's jellybean-colored, Walter Wick-like photos of toys--trucks, rubber duckies, dinos, miniature dolls--and found-object yard-sale bric-a-brac are eye catching, humorous, and illustrative of the concepts presented on each bright white page. For example, in the series show opposites, two plastic doll figures demonstrate "EASY" standing simply with arms out and "HARD" in the same pose but balanced in a precarious handstand. In the series demonstrating "PUSH" and "PULL" these same versatile dollies shove along a fat green frog bigger than they are. Blocks spell out colors as well as show them, and novel plastic figures such as a flamingo portray the letters of the alphabet. Kids will pore over these ingenious illustrations on their own as they unconsciously absorb the ideas and terms behind the retro-styled photos.

Reviewers rave and buyers brag over the merits of this little concept book, with Publishers Weekly awarding it a starred review. If you have a rising Kindergartner or precocious preschooler (and aren't they all!) around the house or know of one, this is a must-have.

Dyna-Math! Math Attack by Joan Horton

It was Monday at school and our teacher Miss Glass,
Announced, "Now it's time for arithmetic, class.
Can somebody tell me what's seven times ten?"
She was looking at me when she said it again.

I was thinking so hard all my circuits were loaded.
Then all of a sudden, my brain just exploded.

A temporary attack of dyscalcula causes our heroine a catastrophic overflow in the number processing part of her brain. Numbers spew forth, stampeding her classmates, who dash out of the room to escape the ricocheting digits. The nurse begins her triage with a question about causation.

But every time our heroine repeats the problem which caused the eruption, more numbers flood forth. The police are called, but when she repeats the offending problem to the investigating officer, the renewed cascade of numbers sends the police scampering. Downtown the numbers bounce and stick to everything, driving the dogs to bark exponentially, totalling telephone numbers and setting the town clock bonging madly. Down at the town grocer's, Millie's cash register spouts amounts which change all the prices in the place.

Back at the school, the Channel8 News
Arrived with their TV equipment and crews.
"We're live from the school," the anchorman said.
The camera zoomed in for a view of my head.
"How did this happen?" he asked me. "And when?"
I told him, "It happened on seven times ten."

Just as the National Guard appears, only to run for their lives, the heroine gets the gears turning upstairs, and out pops the product in question from her overheated brain.

70!
"Three cheers!" yelled the crowd. "At last," Miss Glass sighed.
"Ten-four," said the cops. My classmates high-fived.

There are not many picture books out there which can provide a fun introduction to (or respite from) times table drill for the third-grade math class. Joan Horton's Math Attack! is a clever story in rhyme which diagnoses a serious problem of math block, with Kristen Brooker's lively and humorous illustrations which are sure to multiply the laughs from primary math classes all over.

Who's Counting? A Million Dots by Andrew Clements

Look at the center of this page. Right at the very center.
Look carefully.
.
That's one dot.
One dot is not very many.
It's just one, and that's just one more than none.

A journey to a million dots begins with a single spot. Andrew Clements' clever over sized nonfiction picture book starts small on its way to a million, but there is a lot of fun along the way for students who are fascinated by BIG NUMBERS.

In clever pixillated illustrations which begin totting up the count, Clements' A Million Dots totals up many a fanciful and fantastic fact using big numbers. On the way to one million, he starts relatively small:

A person must climb 1860 steps to the top of the Empire State Building.

It's 24,901 miles around the earth.

A sooty tern can fly 87,600 hours nonstop after it leaves the nest.

But then, consider these number-crunching facts:

There were more than 500,000 cars junked in the U.S. in the past 16 days!

There are 615,000 different words explained in the Oxford English Dictionary!

An arctic tern flies more than 650,000 miles in a lifetime. (Terns really rock, apparently!)

There are 996,480 still pictures in the movies, E.T., Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Lion King, Forrest Gump, and Home Alone.

The millionth dot gets special treatment, appearing solo on the final page. Although Clements warns that it would take over eleven days to count all 1,000,000 of the dots which compose the illustrations in this book, some kids may want to try. But even if the prospective bean counters poop out before the task is completed, just trying to conceive of what goes into a million of anything is a mind-expanding experience.

Mike Reed's illustrations, composed of and superimposed upon, well, a million dots, work plenty of humor into showing the many fascinating facts. The far-flying tern is tricked out as a typical tourist, clutching maps, camera, luggage, and a passport under one wing, while an astronaut cow jumps the 238,857 miles over the moon. As an amazing and tempting browsing book, A Million Dots should take its place with David Schwartz' classic How Much Is a Million? 20th Anniversary Edition (Reading Rainbow Book). on anybody's math shelf.