Eye Like: Numbers Book

Nature is an excellent math teacher—to learn to count, all you have to do is look at the natural world around you! A rabbit has 2 ears, a clover has 4 leaves, and a starfish has 5 arms. Counting cherries helps us to multiply and the sections of an orange demonstrate division. Every page is a full-color visual feast of spectacular photos and easy-to-understand math concepts. With Eye Like Numbers, your child will discover numbers and learn to count, group, compare, and more!

Give your children books to build basic skills and stimulate a love of reading that will last a lifetime. Inspired by nature, this best-selling series is a fun, innovative way for kids to see, learn, and grow. Colors, Numbers, Shapes, and more, come alive in 32 full-color spreads loaded with bold, eye-catching photographs. Nature can be an excellent teacher!

Children's Literature

While this hardcover picture book for the very young may be an unusual addition to the collection of concept books usually found on library or bookstore shelves, I suspect it is a very effective teaching tool. First, it is not written by an author or authors, but rather by a team who have crafted the text in response to input from the teachers, mothers, and children who have helped develop the "Eyelike" series. Second, it is illustrated not by a single artist working in a traditional picture book medium but rather by a collection of colorful, realistic, commercial images gathered from the stock photo industry, many of which have been cut out and pasted on brightly-hued backgrounds. The basic concept is that to learn to count from one to twelve, all a child has to do is look at nature. A rabbit has two ears; a giraffe has four legs; a starfish has five legs, and so on. The photo illustrations in the first section of the book show the numeral and the number-word in boldface type, along with at least three examples of the right number of natural objects, animals, or animal body parts. In the second section, kids are asked to count on their own, before going on to more advanced mathematical concepts such as numbers in sequence, nonspecific quantities, counting by tens, more or less than, even/odd numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and smallest to largest/largest to smallest quantities. Each two-page spread features a two-, three-, or four-sentence explanatory text. The text is the most troublesome aspect of the book. Some sentences rhyme, and some do not; many are cast in an awkward almost-rhyme with an uneven rhythm that diminishes the book's read-aloud value. Thelayout of the pages is such that it is easy to picture the spreads without the explanatory text, and I believe the book would have worked better without it. Somehow, by forcing a story aspect through the text, the creators distract readers from the simple beauty of the numbers and photos, the otherwise clean page layout, and so forth; however, I still believe that the book offers teachers, parents, and young learners a lot of fun while practicing some math basics. Reviewer: Dianne Ochiltree