Patterning and ways of sorting are the focus of the third in Brocket's four-part series, and, as with her color and texture entries, her brightly colored close-up photos truly make the book.
Beginning with a definition, Brocket treats readers to a visual feast of patterns. Her up-close photos show a wide array of objects with their own distinctive patterns, from fabrics and architectural elements to food and plants. Simple arrangements of objects share a page with complex ones, and the familiar are mixed in with the new: a quilt, a candy-decorated cake, a garden full of lettuce, a dahlia, the shadow of a fence, a building’s windows, polka-dot socks. But Brocket does not stop there—she delves into the reasons for patterns. They help us identify plants, stay organized, decorate and plan, but, most of all, they are pleasing to the eye. While this entry lacks the great adjectives that made the first two in the series such standouts, the text does give children some words to help describe what they see—swirls, stripes, dots, zigzag. Brocket peppers the text with challenges that require children to identify the patterns, to look for more around them and to create their own, even pointing out how the same collection of rocks can be sorted in different ways to create different patterns.
Another solid entry sure to attract the attention of art and math teachers alike. (Informational picture book. 4-8)
