Considering the many awesome math concept books that are on the market, this is one to skip. (Informational picture book....
Riding on the wave of her successful Teddy Bear Counting (2010), McGrath once again brings out the colorful teddy-bear counters to teach kids mathematical concepts.
Here, though, with its focus on so many different mathematical ideas, McGrath’s latest is too overpacked to achieve it all. Of the sections, graphing is the strongest, using both words and artwork to explain how to graph the bears and read the finished graph. From there, it is downhill. While she nicely illustrates the fact that 2x10 and 10x2 are equal, McGrath fails to explain what is going on in either multiplication or division. Students without the book’s 47 bears may find themselves confused. If not, they will almost certainly be by the end, when ordinal numbers are presented. “For the six [bears] that are left / slowly follow each word: / the fourth bear goes first, / the fifth second, the third third!” The breezy rhyming verses that worked well for a younger audience and the simple concept of counting are not suited to either the older audience of this text or to the more complex concepts, which require more explanation than is given. Nihoff’s hand-drawn digital illustrations nicely match the text, the bears assuming different poses only when it won’t distract from the learning.
Considering the many awesome math concept books that are on the market, this is one to skip. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58089-283-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
Score one for cleanliness. Like (almost) all Munsch, funny as it stands but even better read aloud, with lots of exaggerated...
The master of the manic patterned tale offers a newly buffed version of his first published book, with appropriately gloppy new illustrations.
Like the previous four iterations (orig. 1979; revised 2004, 2006, 2009), the plot remains intact through minor changes in wording: Each time young Jule Ann ventures outside in clean clothes, a nefarious mud puddle leaps out of a tree or off the roof to get her “completely all over muddy” and necessitate a vigorous parental scrubbing. Petricic gives the amorphous mud monster a particularly tarry look and texture in his scribbly, high-energy cartoon scenes. It's a formidable opponent, but the two bars of smelly soap that the resourceful child at last chucks at her attacker splatter it over the page and send it sputtering into permanent retreat.
Score one for cleanliness. Like (almost) all Munsch, funny as it stands but even better read aloud, with lots of exaggerated sound effects. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-427-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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An all-day sugar rush, putting the “fun” back into, er, education.
A young visionary describes his ideal school: “Perfectly planned and impeccably clean. / On a scale, 1 to 10, it’s more like 15!”
In keeping with the self-indulgently fanciful lines of If I Built a Car (2005) and If I Built a House (2012), young Jack outlines in Seussian rhyme a shiny, bright, futuristic facility in which students are swept to open-roofed classes in clear tubes, there are no tests but lots of field trips, and art, music, and science are afterthoughts next to the huge and awesome gym, playground, and lunchroom. A robot and lots of cute puppies (including one in a wheeled cart) greet students at the door, robotically made-to-order lunches range from “PB & jelly to squid, lightly seared,” and the library’s books are all animated popups rather than the “everyday regular” sorts. There are no guards to be seen in the spacious hallways—hardly any adults at all, come to that—and the sparse coed student body features light- and dark-skinned figures in roughly equal numbers, a few with Asian features, and one in a wheelchair. Aside from the lack of restrooms, it seems an idyllic environment—at least for dog-loving children who prefer sports and play over quieter pursuits.
An all-day sugar rush, putting the “fun” back into, er, education. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55291-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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