2023 NAIWE Children’s Book Winner
Pebbles and the Biggest Number
Author: Joey Benun
Children love to learn, and children love color, and Pebbles and the Biggest Number plays into both elements, attracting kids of a variety of ages. Even before opening the book, the attractiveness of the cover easily catches a reader’s attention, and the illustrations show that this will be a fun book about big numbers.
Readers will quickly find out that the copyright page is the insightful navigator of the book as it includes questions for children to ponder, tips on how to explore the book, and ideas for interacting with the numbers.
This is not a typical book that teaches children about numbers. The book does not begin with the number one and continue through a handful of numbers. Instead, Pebbles the butterfly loves numbers but is bored with the small numbers that surround him. And so he set off on a journey to find the biggest number.
On his journey, Pebbles asks his animal friends for the biggest number they know, each sharing a number and relating that number to another learning concept.
As if learning about numbers wasn’t enough, the book includes additional information to pique the interest of readers. Science Spot teaches about the insect and animal characters. Number Note teaches about another way to think about the number explored on the given page. Did You Know teaches a concept related to the scene on the page. Fun Fact adds even more information for the readers to learn.
Pebbles and the Biggest Number concludes with a Dig Deeper section, which includes new words for the reader to learn. These pages continue with the colorful theme and include images of the friends Pebbles has met along his journey. This section ends with a nice summary chart of the numbers learned throughout the book, showing them in another format to help the reader understand them even better.
This was a delightful book to read, and the effort that went in to making this book highly educational and extremely inviting and entertaining was obvious. Such an informative read even for the parents who can learn about the big numbers of life!
Congratulations, Joey Benun’s Pebbles and the Biggest Number for being a NAIWE 2023 Book Award winner!
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