10 cats by Emily Gravett

2022    

picture book, ages 3-5, preschool, cats, animals, colours, counting, Gravett Emily,    

There are ten cats. One is white, two are black, three have stripes, four have patches … and then they find some tins of paint. We carry on counting up to ten with cats acquiring red, yellow, blue,   orange and green blotches until we have ten multi-coloured cats.  Mum cat, the white one, bathes them one by one.

Any child who likes cats will love this book. The illustrations are delightful.

This book gives the child the opportunity to practise counting and recognising colours. They may also use some prereading skills. The text is very simple and although the font has a serif it uses simple ‘a’s and ‘g’s.  The numbers are written as figures.

The pictures contain a supplementary story.

Wolves by Emily Gravett

                                                      

2016, first published 2002  

Rabbit goes to the library to choose a book about wolves. With Rabbit we learn where wolves live, what they look like, which parasites they have to endure, all about their teeth and what they eat.  There is a story too.  Fortunately for rabbit, the wolf he actually encounters is a vegetarian.

The illustrations are amusing and add a little to the story.

There are some novelty interactive elements.  There is an old-fashioned library card at the beginning of the book. There is a letter that the child can take out of an envelope.  The double spread where this is situated is covered in realistic pictures of letters and a receipt from the Burrowed Wok that provides Carrotenese takeaways.

There is even another story at the end of the book.  The chid is invited to make a booklet that tells the story of the ten little rabbits.  This story is more suitable for the emergent reader.      

It has sixteen double spreads.  The paper in this edition is matt. The book is almost square and tending towards portrait suggesting that there may be an expectation that the child would read it alone.