Review by Booklist Review
Jaunty rhymes pair with illustrations of energetic children with large, round, expressive faces in schools, neighborhoods, and homes to introduce some of the many ways math fills our lives. At a birthday party, children use numbers to play bingo, fractions to divide up a pizza, and more. Other cheery, busy scenes depict the children measuring ingredients for a recipe, calculating the distance they ride on the school bus, and earning money at a lemonade stand. The concepts of counting, adding, subtracting, comparing, and sorting are included in addition to lessons on weight, calendars, time, shapes, patterns, graphs, and charts. Young readers will enjoy spotting how a black cat and white dog enhance both the merriment and math concepts in each scene. The endpapers sport even more fun and develop visual literacy skills as opening shapes, such as a circle, oval, and hexagon, become a donut, football, and spider web on the closing endpapers. A delightful first look at STEM.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 1--2--This rhyming picture book describes math as part of our daily lives, such as counting eggs, recognizing patterns in the city, and the distance traveled in a car. Spreads feature four lines of rhyming text along with colorful drawings of a relatively diverse group of children engaging in typical activities. The simple text does not attempt to explain how math works. Instead, it serves to introduce the subject to young children: "What is math?/ It's building a house./ It's the pattern of seasons./ The size of a mouse." Yoshikawa brings the same colorful, cheerful, and appealing illustration style that she used in Stephanie Calmenson's Late for School! to this work. VERDICT Overall, the book is a fun and engaging introduction to math and a solid purchase for libraries looking to expand their early math collections.--Kate Rao
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Another collaboration by Dotlich and Yoshikawa brings a school subject to life. As in 2006's What Is Science? jaunty rhymes introduce readers to many different answers to the titular question, the illustrations showing an array of children, diverse in terms of race and ability, exploring their world, attending school, and interacting with friends. By Dotlich's account, math encompasses: ages, counting, money, addition and subtraction, the calendar, time, matching, weighing, baking, patterns, building a house, height, distances, selling, sorting, comparing, number stories, shapes, multiplication, and charts and graphs. But whereas the science topics were easy to discern (dinosaur fossils versus stars), children may have more trouble picking out the things listed in the rhymes in the illustrations. For instance, "It's a matching game, / it's a blastoff chart. / It's a block of days. / It's a whole, it's a part." The busy classroom scene shows a birthday pizza party in progress. Only diligent eyes will pick up on the bingo game that a few kids are playing, the two students measuring height against a wall, and the chart that shows the weekly schedule, all backgrounded by the giant pizza that's front and center. Still, this is a great way to show even the math-averse or math-phobic the many ways that math is hiding in their everyday lives. (This book was reviewed digitally.) A solid definition of math that shows its ubiquity. (Informational picture book. 3-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
