While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race two students even sport glasses. The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
Neither the picture-book medium nor the Numberlys app is as well-served as each deserves. Much of the book requires turning pages vertically as if opening a calendar, matching the tall cityscape but making shared reading awkward. But the visual richness isn’t matched by the insubstantial plot, and suggesting that numbers aren’t beautiful or that the sole source of color and fun is our alphabet seems trite and misguided. The opportunity to look more closely at the Numberlys’ world is definitely an attraction. Young readers-and significant adults-frequently look for books to extend screen-based story experiences.
#Numberlys app full
Numbers disappear altogether the world transforms to full color. Upon completion of the Z, the letters, bright with color, form the words of new, appealing ideas (“jellybeans,” “yellow,” “pizza”), even names. A vast, somber art deco metropolis rendered in straight lines and monochromatic grays and browns houses a world of numbers and gears: “verything added up.” Five little beings, sporting round eyes and round heads (some with antennae), want “MORE.” They design and manufacture a familiar, Western alphabet from the forms of numbers. Joyce and Ellis’ Moonbot Studios fable about an evolution in thinking loses something in the translation from tablet to print, despite its 50-plus–page length. A successful app makes a transition to print.
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