Anno Mitsumasa was a Japanese illustrator and writer of children's books, known best for picture books with few or no words. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1984 for his "lasting contribution to children's literature." He created the Annos Books series, covering many young readers' learning concepts. As a preschool teacher, I’m familiar with his work, and I love to use his books in my classroom. I find them enjoyable and an excellent resource for language development as children help to tell the story based on the picture. It’s also an ideal resource for connecting different content areas to literacy.

A great book about teaching kids how to count. ( )

What a simple but fantastic number counting book for children. The illustrations build as you go through the story. The book starts with zero, which is such a tricky concept to understand for small children. The snowy scene then builds and changes as you go through the numbers 0-12.Along the side of the illustrations you see a base ten frame that add a unfix cube with each new number. Then when you go past 10 a new set of cubes starts along side the ten. I love the mathematical connection for students and children will love counting the sets of each number that they find on each new page. Students will also enjoy this as a wordless picture book, and they can tell a story about the changing seasons and the people and animals you see depicted on the pages. ( )

This is a counting book. On each page there is a number with things to count. As the pages turn the number gets bigger and there are more things to count.

"Every child is a natural mathematician", says Mitsumasa Anno. As children compare and classify things around them, they are bringing order to what they see and are actually doing basic math. This book introduced numbers and counting. Watercolor pictures add to the concepts.