Read Aloud Thursday: Counting Cats

This might seem like an odd theme this week, but recently we happened to read these three really great counting books all about cats.

This cute book by Lisa Westberg Peters features a cat who lives in a hardware store who is working through the night while the family sleeps. The illustrations are a combination of stunning digital photography and mixed media. The counting is not central to the book but is fun for a preschooler and helps carry the simple story.

In this jazzy book by Caroline Stutson cats dance all over the city at night. The cats dance in pairs so it introduces the idea of skip-counting. The text dances along in a neat little rhyme as the cats dance the samba, the waltz, the boogie, the polka, the conga and more. The color scheme is unusually muted for a children’s book but it goes with the text and the little cats are adorable without being cutesy.

This book by Lauren Thompson begins with “zero” cats in a house. One by one cats come to the house to play and then leave again as the book counts up to twenty and back down to zero. Its’ a simple book and the illustrations are detailed and fun but there are also complicated hidden math concepts here: zero, addition, subtraction, sets, multiplication.

To see what others are reading with their kids, pop over to Hope is the Word.