Sorting through Spring

January 15, 2013
Flatt and Barron's second in the Math in Nature series solves many of the first's problems, though the rhythms and rhymes remain inconsistent, and there is still no answer key. Flatt leads readers through sorting, charts and comparisons, though they will need familiarity with these concepts--math is tested but not taught in these pages, and the questions are not always the most basic. "If 8 hummingbird eggs equal 4 robin eggs, which two ratios are correct: 3 to 1, 8 to 4, 5 to 1, 2 to 1?" On a page that finds the fox family wondering what Father will catch: "Is their dinner impossibly, unlikely, likely, or certainly a vole? A gray squirrel? A rabbit? A cat?" Several pages also ask open-ended questions, allowing readers to both construct meaning from the artwork and explain it. "Nature Notes" give a few brief facts about the featured creatures. As in Counting on Fall (2012), Barron's gorgeous cut-paper collages are certainly the highlight, drenching every page in spring sights and colors. Objects are easy to delineate from the background, though that doesn't always mean that the answers are easy to find: On the schooling smelt page, readers are asked to find two patterns. One is a simple, ABA repeating pattern, while the other asks readers to notice that the groups of fish increase by two. The simple is juxtaposed with the challenging, making the book both flexible and hard to pin down, audience-wise. (Math picture book. 5-10)

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May 1, 2013

K-Gr 3-Flatt and Barron's effort suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, as the highlighted math skills are rather sophisticated, but the children who can navigate the concepts of sorting, patterns, and ratios will likely be turned off by the cute representations of wildlife and nature. One of the jewel-colored spreads shows a father fox on the hunt for his family's dinner while varying numbers of potential prey frolic nearby, and readers are asked whether the dinner is "impossibly, unlikely, likely, or certainly" going to be a vole, gray squirrel, rabbit, or cat. Those are fairly challenging words for budding readers, much less budding mathematicians. Also, examples of the concepts presented are not included. Supplemental information focuses on the biology of the animals featured in the main text. Younger kids will delight in Barron's gorgeous cut-paper collage artwork, and they'll learn a little bit from the basic information at the book's conclusion, but this volume will have a hard time fitting in the 510s when it seems more suited to the picture-book shelves.-Alyson Low, Fayetteville Public Library, AR

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