How Many Blue Birds Flew Away?: A Counting Book with a Difference
Kindergarten-Grade 2&ndash;Although this book can be used with children learning to count and subtract, it falls short in many other ways. The gouache illustrations are bland and the text is dry, labored, and boring. The difference alluded to in the subtitle refers to the questions that readers are asked to figure out. For example, the first page shows a bowl of fruit and youngsters are asked, How many apples were there? How many oranges were there? How many more apples than oranges were there? In addition, there is no plot or real story line; instead the book reads like a series of math exercises. Children will quickly lose interest and tire of the repetitiveness. Libraries would be better off sticking with books by Stuart J. Murphy and Amy Axelrod, who know how to put fun into math while telling a story, too.&ndash;Lisa S. Schindler, Bethpage Public Library, NYCopyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.