Skip to main content

If You Like... Counting Books

When it comes to back-to-school season, ABC books (also called abecedaries) tend to dominate the scene. I get it. If you're starting the school year, you're most likely gearing up to talk about the alphabet and learn about all the different letters. But something almost as fun as letters is numbers. If back to school makes you think about counting 123, then here are some awesome counting books for you!

Written by Caspar Salmon
Illustrated by Matt Hunt
Lincoln, MA: Nosy Crow Inc., 2023. Picture Book.

Do you think that you're so smart? Do you think that you can count all the numbers really high? That's great, but this book only wants you to count to one. We are just mastering counting to one. Of course, you could always try to outsmart the book. But who would want to do that? This is a very fun and goofy interactive book that will have older kids dying to practice their counting -- well past the number one.

By Emily Gravett
London: Boxer Books, Ltd., 2023. Picture Book.

Nine playful kittens, and their one sleeping mama, get caught up in a color-mixing, counting adventure. As mama naps, the mischievous kittens find cans of primary-color paint and the ten kittens are soon covered in red spots, yellow spots, and blue spots. And before long, in green, orange, and purple splats. Light on text, this book effectively teaches counting and color mixing with illustrations that are a delight to study and that are reminiscent of classic children's books.

Written by David LaRochelle
Illustrated by Lian Cho
New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 2023. Picture Book.

For readers ready to go a step beyond counting, this hilarious picture book includes subtracting and adding dragons from our 100 dragon total. As we follow our 100 dragons -- all named Broccoli -- on their wild and crazy adventures, made possible by hilarious illustrations, we are also sneakily subtracting and adding to get back to our 100 dragons. Silly but entertaining, perfect to challenge the belief that math is boring.

By Susie Ghahremani
New York: Abrams Appleseed, 2017. Picture Book.

Still ready to go beyond counting 1 to 10? In this unendingly cute picture book, simple text helps us to count and stack a group of adorably cute cats. At first, we're counting as our cats are stacking, until a stack of more than three becomes unstable -- and the cats figure out other ways to count and stack. A darling little counting book, perfect for cat lovers or anyone else.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

Review: Blood in the Water

Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.