Tuesday Storytime: Counting with Ducks

And yes, there are enough duck books in the picture book world for there to be a three-book storytime specifically about ducks and counting.

Nine Ducks Nine (previously reviewed here)
Sarah Hayes
ISBN: 9780763638160
9 watercolor ducks hatch a plan to outwit a pursuing fox through an idyllic countryside.

This is essentially the same story as Do Like a Duck Does (Hindley and Bates, 2002 Candlewick hardcover ISBN: 0763616680), where a family of ducks outwit a fox and the fox ends up taking a swim.  To be perfectly honest, I like the cadence and the illustrations of that story better than this one.  But, this one has numbers and counting, and this one is also a longer read.

Quack and Count
Keith Baker  (Big Fat Hen, 1994 HMH hardcover ISBN: 9780152928698)
ISBN: 0152928588
Colorful and textural collages (even the words!) follow permutations of 7 ducklings.

I've used Baker's Big Fat Hen in a counting storytime before, and he's a stunningly talented artist.  This is less a counting book, and more of a math concepts book, but whatever.  It totally counts.  We start with 7 ducklings all together, and then Baker creates a clever series of rhymes for each sum of seven: starting with "Slipping, sliding, having fun / 7 ducklings, 6 plus 1."  Then 5 + 2, 4 + 3, and so on.  What's fun is to compare the different scenes with reversed sums: so we also have "7 ducklings, 1 plus 6 / In the water playing tricks" to compare with the first rhyme.  The pages are all in full spreads, with the seven ducks divided up between the two pages to match the sum in question.  Really pretty book, and really clever concept.

Five Little Ducks
from the nursery song, illustrated by Ivan Bates
ISBN: 0439746930
Colored pencils and watercolors. Bright expressive characters foregrounded against soft scenery.

Ivan Bates is a beautiful illustrator, and I love his work so much.  I try not have repeats of an author or an illustrator within a storytime, which is the other reason I didn't choose Do Like a Duck Does for this trio.  This is a simple illustration of the first verse of the rhyme, but there's a cute little story hidden within the illustrations about just why the ducklings aren't coming back each time.  So adorable.


This ended up being on the very short end on things, but I actually try to choose shorter sets of books for the early fall.  Families are coming in with their younger kids only (the older ones have headed off to preschool or kindie) and without the older kids to model good storytime behavior, it's harder for the little ones (and to be totally honest, the parents) to keep from squiggling around like mad.  This is the sort of thing you figure out over time, watching the pattern repeat every fall, and you just learn to work around it - shorter stories, more obvious transitions, really expressive stories with very narrative illustrations.    

Tuesday Storytime: Counting on Animals

So many good counting, sequential, and numeracy books out there, it's very easy to subdivide them into really specific categories.

Nine Ducks Nine
Sarah Hayes
ISBN:09780763638160
Bright white ducks (and one mallard hen) count down from 9 preparing a tricky surprise for a fox.

This one is very similar to Judy Hindley's Do Like a Duck Does, and I've used it with that one, putting the wordless Rosie's Walk (Pat Hutchins) in the middle for an 'outwit the fox' storytime.  Here I went with the count-down aspect of the story, as the nine ducks begin luring and teasing the fox to chase them down to the "rickety old bridge" as individual ducks keep slipping off to prepare the trap.  Cute, but a couple of comments calling characters "stupid" at the end get redacted by me, just to be on the safe side.



One, Two, Cockatoo
Sarah Garson
ISBN: 9781842709443
Saturated colors in the background make the white cockatoos (in the wild) stand out vividly.

Very cute, but VERY short.  A nice look at addition, on an extremely basic level, and slowly counting up to ten total, with a bonus baby chick bringing us to (an unstated) eleven.  The birds are drawn beautifully and expressively, with lots of inclusive and friendly gestures that don't ever cross the line into too-human.


One-Dog Canoe
Mary Casanova (Utterly Otterly Night), illustrated by Ard Hoyt
ISBN: 9780312561185
Consistently shocked expressions on our narrator's face really sell this cumulative canoe trip.

Our narrator is setting off on a canoe ride, but her sweet pup begs for a ride, which she agrees to, calling their craft firmly a "one-dog canoe."  Her decision gets repeatedly overruled by larger and larger wilderness-appropriate animals - a beaver, a loon, wolf, bear, moose, and finally the one frog that is more than the canoe can take.  The animals are sketched loosely for comedic effect, but remain mostly anatomically correct, and certainly are all size-correct.  The canoe at the end is barely visible.  Everyone naturally gets a dunking, then narrator and dog are back on their way, having reiterated that it really IS a "one-dog canoe."