Customer Reviews

Icky Bug Numbers

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book because of the cover. Most of the counting books that I have for my sixteen-month old child spell out the numbers, and I wanted a book that would cover the numbers in numeric form.

This isn't a book that you can read in one sitting to a child. Right now I just read the first four pages to my child. On the first four pages, there are numbers in numeric form from 0-10, and lots of bugs that we can count together on each of the numbers. That is exactly what I wanted.

After the first four pages, the lessons become progressively harder. First the kids count backwards. Then there are several pages where the kids can find bugs with two antennas, six legs, ten spots or five stripes, etc. After that, the kids can practice how to count to 20, how to skip count even and odd numbers up to 20, how to add, how to subtract (with a gorgeous picture of a spider catching bugs), and finally how to count to 100.

I'm only giving this four stars because I'm not exactly sure who this book is aimed for if you want to read the whole thing at once - the lessons at the beginning seem to easy for a kindergartner and the lessons at the end are advanced for a preschooler. However, I am very happy that I bought it because it is helping me figure out what math concepts I want to introduce my child to.

Its difficult to find books with the simplest English yet a school-age topic for beginner ELLs. This is one of those books. It is useful for teaching number words as well as words referring to different ways of counting such as, by twos. The visuals are interesting to all ages and are an excellent scaffold to comprehension. Finally, the text lends itself to several English language teaching strategies.

I've recommended this entire series in my book, Kindergarten Simplified, not only for the educational value, but because the illustrations are all beautiful.

These books also help fill a void in a market that is typically full of "girly" topics. Icky Bugs are an attractive topic for boys.

Why 'icky' bugs? Why encourage children to be wary of nature at such a young age? I suppose we should also write books entitled 'Boring Math' and 'Really Hard Science.'