Marie's Reviews > How Many Baby Pandas?

A 2010 NCTE Orbis Pictus honors non-fiction book. Science writer Sandra Markles organizes information in her book How Many Baby Pandas to appeal to multiple age groups. She helps children learn the facts about giant pandas and teaches them about counting numbers one to eight. On one page she writes a sentence that lower primary grades can read plus writes a number at the bottom of the page. Children will see the numeral printed in a large red font and the word printed in a bold font of a different color next to it. On the opposite page she expands her reading audience by writing about panda facts from their gestational period to maturity. A tiny bit of mathematics is included when she writes "How many baby pandas are playing? 6 six. Three on the playground....plus three in the yard." Each page has a large photograph of the pandas doing something. The book includes fun facts and a glossary/index at the back of the book. What I really liked was that at the end of the book the author poses an ecological question for the children making them think beyond the text.