This is a fun counting book! The author encourages to reader to count the goats on the various pages. The goats are engaged in a variety of activities, like flying airplanes and throwing snowballs. This is a bit more complex than your typical counting book because the author never gives a clue as to how many goats are supposed to be counted or mentions any numbers. There are also parts where readers are supposed to find specific goats in specific activities. But it's fun to count the goats on each page. The illustrations are hilarious and colorful. Who knew counting goats could be so much fun? Mem Fox is back with one of her best texts yet. Let’s Count Goats! Yes why not – can’t think of anything more I’d like to do. This humourous story appeals to young children’s sense of the absurd:Here we see a mountain goat frisking in the sun.And here we see a city goat going for a run.The illustrations do what all good illustrations do in a picture book worth its salt – they add extra information and/or a subplot to the story. Jan Thomas has done just that with her very stylised goats and saturated use of colour (no white backgrounds for Thomas!). She makes lots of visual references to goats eating everything within sight, including the airport goat who is supposedly looking for her cases, but who we find merrily sitting on the luggage carousel chomping away on the suitcases. She also makes the reader work for the gag about the fireman goat climbing through the smoke - created, we realise by the candles on the birthday cake burning away in the bottom right hand corner of the page.Fox also includes lots of subtle puns and word plays:Here we see an over goat.And this one’s going under.Fox is a master of pace, rhyme and rhythm. She knows how to manipulate the reader to speed up and slow down their reading in the way she mixes up rhyming couplets, with stand alone phrases and rhyming triplets. She has also included so many interesting words to build the young reader’s vocab and make them want to read the story again:‘Frisking’, ‘Lost and loudly bleating’, rowdy, ‘terrified of thunder’,’huddled’This is what the best of trade texts, as opposed to educational texts (often referred to readers that come home for children to practice their reading), can do. I just loved it and it’s the sort of story I would be happy to read over and over again which is always a good test. Highly recommended. 1+ and up.
Do You like book Let's Count Goats! (2010)?
Really cute. One of my favorite children's authors teamed up with one of my favorite illustrator.
—barbieneika
