Babar’s elephant children teach preschoolers to count to 20.
Intended age group: 3-5
There comes a time when your pride in the fact that your preschooler can count to 10 turns to panic, when you realize she can count no further. Enter Babar’s Counting Book to the rescue. It is one of a minority of counting books that goes all the way up to 20. It is also exceptional in that it demonstrates how to display the numbers up to 10 on your hands: as the elephant children count the animals and vehicles they encounter in their walk, Zephir the monkey holds up the appropriate number of fingers. This skill helps young children understand rudimentary math concepts. Each page in this book presents bold, cheerful and appealing pictures that provide opportunities for counting practice in a way that seems more like play than learning. At the end of the book, Babar presents the reader with a royal certificate as a reward for learning to count to 20.
In Horn Book (Fall, 2003), the reviewer commented that the story was boring, but liked the clear pictures that were “easy to count”, and thought that children would enjoy the characters and the certificate. This review was less than enthusiastic, and might deter people from buying a useful book. A Publisher’s Weekly (2/24/03) review was more or less just a note that the book had been republished. The reviewer seemed to like the book, since he said that the counting “fun” extends to 20 objects, but the review didn’t offer much in the way of description of the book’s usefulness.