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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Yarlett takes poor advantage of the format, as readers see only half of the correspondence, but the premise and punny names...
A lad finds a big red dragon in his basement and wisely seeks expert advice about its care and feeding in this epistolary episode.
Young Alexander’s missives (there are no cellphones, nor parents, in sight) are mostly paraphrased rather than shown, but each response comes as a small note folded into a pocket that’s been printed and shaped like an envelope: “Douse it in water right away!” writes panic-stricken fire chief H.Y. Drant; find it a large house or castle, advises B. East of World Animal Welfare; “fatten it up,” suggests Angus Teak the butcher (“Look forward to [eating, scratched out] meeting your dragon”) with sinister relish. Boy and dragon have wonderful times together, but the ultimate realization that dragons really don’t make good pets leads the narrator to follow the written advice of best friend Hillary (“the wisest person I knew”) and set it free. The later arrival of a slightly burned picture postcard in the “post” reassures him that the dragon won’t be forgetting to keep in touch. The human figures in Yarlett’s cartoon illustrations are either white or have their heads cut off at the page top. With the exception of the pasted-on postcard from the dragon at the end, all of the correspondence is removable and thereby losable.
Yarlett takes poor advantage of the format, as readers see only half of the correspondence, but the premise and punny names add some appeal. (Novelty. 6-8)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61067-818-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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