Math

A busy triangle gets tired of holding up roofs, being slices of pie and halves of sandwiches, and even of doing its favorite activity — slipping into place when people put their hands on their hips. It thinks life would be more interesting if the local shapeshifter gave it one more side and one more angle. And so the triangle is transformed into a quadrilateral. Although as a quadrilateral it is a television screen, a window frame, and more, it soon grows tired of that shape, too. Each time it tires of its shape, it asks the shapeshifter to add another side and angle. The triangle successively becomes a pentagon, hexagon, and heptagon . . . until it has so many sides it doesn’t know which side is up! Not surprisingly, it asks the shape-shifter for its old shape back and then is content to be a triangle again. The colorful illustrations and engaging text make a great introduction to shapes and geometry. A guide at the end includes background information and suggestions for extending children’s learning.

A textbook in disguise, this fascinating volume embraces both the math enthusiast and the clock-watching math victim holding his breath until the period is over. It’s not Alice in Wonderland, but it has that feel when Robert, who is no math wizard, has recurrent dreams of a number devil set on teaching him math concepts. In a series of 12 dreams Robert discovers the amazing world of numbers from the meaning of zero to numbers that expand without end. This international best-seller adds fun and adventure to math and teaches readers about logic in the process.

In the tradition of his best-selling alphabet book, Animalia, author and illustrator GraemeBase takes young readers on an exhilarating journey of discovery with an ingenious fusion of counting book, puzzle book, storybook, and art book. From the plains of Africa and the jungles of the Amazon to the woodlands of North America and the deserts of outback Australia, the animals come together to drink from the water hole. But their water supply is diminishing. What’s going on? Each sumptuous landscape illustration conceals hidden animal pictures for readers to find as they count the animals that visit the water hole and try to solve the mystery: will the animals come back or is their water source gone forever?

This wordless book demonstrates that a simple scene is not always what it seems! It begins with a close-up image of a rooster’s comb. Each successive image provides a more distant perspective, revealing that each picture is a small part of a larger scene — farm children watching the rooster, aerial views of the children and farm, and so on. As the imaginary lens pulls farther and farther away, we see that the farm scene and children are actually a toy farm set being played with by a child, the child turns out to be in a photograph of a magazine being read by a boy on a cruise ship, the cruise ship is part of an advertisement on a bus . . . The reader’s attention is captured as the imaginary lens pulls out into space. The Earth grows smaller and smaller until it is a tiny white dot on a black page. Have students also read Re-Zoom (Penguin, 1995), a sequel by the same author that examines the process in reverse.