One Some Many. By Marthe Jocelyn. Illustrated by Tom Slaughter. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2004.
This is a phenomenal counting book! Not simple counting by rote from one to ten, One Some Many instead explores the concept of number for very young children while also providing the standard progression to ten. One is a beautiful golden pear against a bright red background. Turn the page to see… two? No, to see some: three golden pears against the same bright red background. And on the facing page: many, as a golden pear drops from a tree laden with pears. And then hardly any, a pear eaten to the core. Jocelyn picks up again with the number two, introducing other relative quantities along the way. The gorgeous cut-paper illustrations, in bold primary colors, are utterly arresting to the eye, and invite you to linger on each page, happily contemplating the combinations of objects and numbers before you.
For a different take on numbers, look for Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak’s My Arctic 1,2,3, which features illustrations of Arctic animals in their natural settings and in relation to each other—as in “Nine snowy owls, beginning their hunt, take to the air... Ten lemmings scurry among the dwarf willows.” This book includes the numbers twenty, one hundred and one million, as well as an afterword about life in the Arctic and a glossary of Inuit words that makes this suitable for children as old as eight or more.
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