MotherReader

With Easter on the horizon, I've been buying candy for our annual egg hunt. It started off years ago in our old neighborhood, but the girls came to expect it as another facet of the whole Easter bunny thing. Then just as we could have given it up by handing each girl a gift card to Aeropostle, my niece came along and the tradition continued. So the night before Easter you'll find me loading up a ridiculous amount of plastic eggs with candy fun packs, Hershey's kisses, and jelly beans. Oh, so many jelly beans. I would have estimated a million jelly beans, but with this book I now know better.

How Many Jelly Beans? A Giant Book of Giant Numbers
by Andrea Menotti, illustrated by Yancey Labat
Chronicle 2012, review copy sent by publishers
The first thing you notice about the book is the size. It's a large book, perhaps to emphasize the enormity of the mathematical concepts and certainly to accommodate the pull-out page in the back where one million jelly beans are represented. But at the beginning, we start with Emma and a reasonable number of sweets. But as her brother requests more, they continue to top each other with the number of jelly beans they would want up to a million. (Which Aiden has to admit is a bit much.) Very large amounts are conveyed with simple, bright graphics that make the numbers more real and understandable. It would be a particularly fun choice for a preschool or early education classroom. It would also be great in an Easter basket, but to fit you're going to need a bigger basket.

For more nonfiction selections, visit our Nonfiction Monday host, Rasco from RIF