Number Rhymes: Tens and Teens

This large portrait-shaped number book is a visual treat from its energetic front cover right through to the dynamic end pages.  It takes up a playful approach to numbers with ten jolly rhymes including ‘Five Little Monkeys’ and ‘Twenty Green Bottles’. Often the verses present a new twist to a familiar version of the rhymes and encourage creative thinking about numbers. The illustrations are hugely enjoyable as well as enhancing the meaning. So ‘One and One Are Two’ juxtaposes numbers as abstractions, for example ‘ 5 and 5 are 10’,  with groups of objects – in this case two groups of  five seafaring men. Then at the end of the rhyme a boy is pictured setting out sums. So we have a sense of moving from the specific (actual objects) to the abstraction: five plus five of anything always makes ten.  For some children this move from counting objects to understanding the principle is challenging and this book will help. Children are taken beyond the limits of the usual ‘one to ten’ number book, and helped to practise counting backwards and counting in twos. Help is provided for the sharing adult in a section called ‘Cracking the Codes’.