How Many Blue Birds Flew Away?: A Counting Book with a Difference - Hardcover

Giganti Jr., Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060007621 ISBN 13: 9780060007621

Publisher: Greenwillow Books, 2005

Synopsis

This is not just another counting book.
In this book you must look carefully at the pictures. You must count. And count again.

This is a counting book with a difference.
What is the difference? The difference is what is left over when you subtract one group from another group.

Why else is this a counting book with a difference?
Because besides counting, you must read and look and think, too. Because there are many things to discover and puzzle out. Because this book is fun!

About this title

About the Authors

Paul Giganti, Jr., teaches mathematics to teachers at the University of California at Berkeley. He is himself a graduate of UC Berkeley, with a degree in mathematics, and he taught in the public schools for fifteen years. He lives with his family in Albany, California.

Donald Crews is the renowned creator of many celebrated children's books, including the Caldecott Honor Books Freight Train and Truck. He and his wife, Ann Jonas, live in New York's Hudson River Valley.

From the Back Cover

This is not just another counting book.
In this book you must look carefully at the pictures. You must count. And count again.

This is a counting book with a difference.
What is the difference? The difference is what is left over when you subtract one group from another group.

Why else is this a counting book with a difference?
Because besides counting, you must read and look and think, too. Because there are many things to discover and puzzle out. Because this book is fun!

Reviews

Kindergarten-Grade 2–Although this book can be used with children learning to count and subtract, it falls short in many other ways. The gouache illustrations are bland and the text is dry, labored, and boring. The difference alluded to in the subtitle refers to the questions that readers are asked to figure out. For example, the first page shows a bowl of fruit and youngsters are asked, How many apples were there? How many oranges were there? How many more apples than oranges were there? In addition, there is no plot or real story line; instead the book reads like a series of math exercises. Children will quickly lose interest and tire of the repetitiveness. Libraries would be better off sticking with books by Stuart J. Murphy and Amy Axelrod, who know how to put fun into math while telling a story, too.–Lisa S. Schindler, Bethpage Public Library, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PreS-K. This attractive math-concept book adds addition and subtraction to a basic counting exercise. Each double-page spread features a striking scene drawn from a child's world--a plate of apples and oranges, kids and parents waiting at a bus stop, and so on. In a set of rhythmic, repetitious questions, the text instructs children to identify how many of two different types of objects are pictured (pens and pencils, for example) and then determine how much larger one group is than another: "How many pencils were there? How many pens were there? How many more pencils than pens were there?" The clear, simple presentation, greatly enhanced by Crews' lovely gouache images, turns the math concepts into puzzles that kids will want to solve, and a closing spread of a city skyline, black against a sky filled with stars ("too many to count!"), makes this a fine choice for winding down at bedtime. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060007621
• ISBN 13: 9780060007621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Crews Donald
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32