513.5

"Roman Numerals I to MM" uses pigs to help children learn roman numerals. The first few pages show each roman numeral next to the equal number of pigs, and the reader is told to count the pigs to learn the roman numeral's value. Though I think it is a cute idea, there are two major problems with this: 1) the illustrations are heavily outlined, so the more pigs there are, the harder it is to count them since the lines tend to blend together, and 2) the roman numeral M represents 1,000. That means that on one page, there are one thousand pigs that the reader has to count. Since I already know my roman numerals, I knew that M stood for 1,000, so I didn't have to count the pigs. But a child who has no concept of roman numerals (or just knows I, V, and X) would have to sit there and count each individual pig, which would take who knows how long. The book also never tells the reader the value of each numeral, so if the reader counts wrong, they won't actually learn any of the values. Besides this major issue I have with the book, I did actually enjoy it. I thought the illustrations were cute and since I already know my numerals, I could enjoy the book without counting 1,000 pigs. After all the counting, the book has a few seek-and-find pages were the amount of each object to find is in roman numeral. I thought that was a fun idea, rather than just listing off the values of roman numerals and leaving it at that. Obviously, this book would be useful in teaching roman numerals to kids, as long as you tell them the actual values while reading. ( )

I thought this book was really text-heavy for children, especially if I was trying to read this to ELLs. Also, a lot of kids would have trouble keeping track of counting the pigs even up to the third grade. I don't think I could use this book to actually teach about roman numerals, but more as a visual of what 50 or 500 pigs looks like. It is too wordy for the primary grades, in my opinion. ( )

I was not a very big fan of this book. When I read the title and saw that it was about Roman numerals, I was quite excited to read this book; however, it fell far short of my expectations. Roman numerals would be a fun and fascinating topic to explore in a children's book, but I didn't think that it was very well executed here. I found Geisert's explanations to be rather unclear, and the expectation that a reader would actually count 1,000 pigs was completely unrealistic. The counting aspect in and of itself was not a problem, but I think that it was taken a little too far in this book, and though I, as someone already familiar with Roman numerals, was able to follow along easily enough, I'm not sure that someone learning Roman numerals for the first time would be able to do so. This book had great potential, and the illustrations were lovely, but I thought that it had some major issues. ( )

Roman Numerals I to MM takes children through a crash course on roman numerals and how they are read. Rather than outwardly stating what each roman numeral means, the values are represented in pictures of pigs that the reader has to count. Although this is useful and fun at the beginning, I feel it would have been better to also state the value once it got into the hundreds or at least provide a chart at the end defining each roman numeral. I was actually a little surprised there wasn't one especially where the copyright date stated it was published in 1996. I would understand the lack of clarity if this book had been published back in the 60's and 70's when roman numerals were used more often, but that wasn't the case later. ( )