Teddy Bear Math

May 9, 2011
The colorful, chunky bears that first appeared in Teddy Bear Counting introduce more advanced concepts like estimation, graphing, division, and multiplication in this squat book. McGrath uses rhyming verse to guide readers; on a spread containing a graph with the glinting bears divided by color, she advises: "Write down the total/ you see in each row./ Let's see if your guess/ was too high or too low." Nihoff incorporates digital hands that point to and reach for the bears, emphasizing their resemblance to counting manipulatives. Though the bears feel surprisingly animated (especially when they open their arms and tumble in air), the book will be most effective when used with the bears' plastic counterparts (not included). Ages 5â8.

June 1, 2011

PreS-Gr 3-Similar in style to McGrath's Teddy Bear Counting (Charlesbridge, 2010), this picture book uses a rainbow of bears to explore sorting, graphing, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and ordinal numbers. Despite the rhyming text and bright illustrations hand drawn digitally in Adobe Photoshop, readers may get more out of Stuart J. Murphy's "MathStart" series (HarperCollins) or Greg Tang's math riddle books (Scholastic), where one concept is introduced as the topic for the book rather than several at once. This book would make a great preview to using bear counters as math tools and is best suited for early-learning classrooms where children have access to these manipulatives.-Melissa Smith, Royal Oak Public Library, MI

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