The Numbers Dance: A Counting Comedy - Hardcover

Nobisso, Josephine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0940112116 ISBN 13: 9780940112117

Publisher: Gingerbread House, 2005

Synopsis

Twirling and whirling, zigging and zagging, numerals dance across the pages, enticing children to play with numbers and develop a better understanding of numeric values in this fun and informative comic approach. Three groups of numerals make mightily concerted attempts to maintain the quirks of their distinct personalities in the face of persistent peer pressure. The irascible 1, 2, 3, and 4, though frail and wiry, would like to impose their ballroom dance style on the robust 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. 5 and 6 cannot help reverting to raucous jazz dancing, no matter how hard they sportingly try to conform, and 7–10 don't see the point of being anything but what they truly are—western line dancers. Scuffles, rumbles, roundups, and coercions ensue until 1–4 have their way and 5–10 "go back to dancing like they want to, again!" The book's rousing, impeccably metered rhymes provide the cadence of each dance style, and the spare accompanying art lends a clean energy to the numerals' challenge to accept each other as they are.

About this title

About the Author

Josephine Nobisso is the award-winning author of more than 20 children's books, including In English, of Course; Show; Don't Tell!, and The Weight of Mass, which were selected as American Bookseller Association Book Sense 76 Picks. She lives in Westhampton Beach, New York. Dasha Ziborova is the illustrator of Crispin the Terrible and In English, of Course. She is a website and children's computer games designer and a big-scale mural painter. She lives in New York City.

From School Library Journal

PreSchool-Grade 4–A counting book that doesn't measure up. And-a-1 And-a-2 And-a-3 And-a-4, Four dainty numbers waltz across the floor. As the numerals dance, the verses sketch the chaos that results from 5 and 6 (rumba and samba dancers) attempting to share the floor, followed by 7 through 10, who are enjoying country line dancing. The numbers, each of a slightly different design and color, border the right side of the spreads in small squares and tumble over the dance floor in larger form, colliding with each other. They try out one another's steps as order is restored and then they all go back to their own styles less boisterously. The verse does not flow naturally in structure or in rhythm, with yahoo made to rhyme with lasso and questionable words such as crumped and rump used to fit the rhyme scheme. In one place, the couplets become triplets. The digital illustrations, rendered from mixed media, have the look of minimalist collages, with largely white pages where the numbers, occasionally embellished by a prop, are cavorting. For a few pages, a background with wallpaper design is used. The general effect is not particularly appealing. The dance-floor milieu is unlikely to draw a preschool or primary-grade audience, and the book doesn't work as an exercise in artistic design for older children.–Judith Constantinides, formerly at East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library, LA
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Edition details

• Publisher: Gingerbread House
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0940112116
• ISBN 13: 9780940112117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Ziborova Dasha