Houghton Mifflin Mathmatics: Shape Space CL
PreSchool-- A young gymnast encounters a huge box of bright, multicolored shapes. - `` `Hmmmm . . . ,' '' she says. Soon she's dancing among them, wearing them, balancing on them, building with them. The text, light and airy, is dressed up with rhyme: ``Take a shape/ take a step/ take a chance/ try a dance . . .'' as the brown-skinned girl, wearing a skirt of triangles, curtsies to the dance partner she's assembled of circles, triangles, and squares. Equally breezy are the colorful illustrations; the ample bright white background makes the shapes stand right out, and ably suggest their relationships to one another. The image of the little girl, the grace of her four- or five-year-old body, and the delight in her face generate the interest and involvement that make the book successful. It has a slightly older look than that projected by the toddlers photographed for MacKinnon/Sieveking's What Shape? (Dial, 1992), but it's less challenging than Yenawine's Shapes (Delacorte, 1991). And it doesn't rely on a gimmick like the mix-and-match split pages that sustain Eric Carle's My Very First Book of Shapes (HarperCollins, 1985). Pleasant and playful, Shape Space works as an entertaining picture book as well as a first exposure to basic geometry. --Liza Bliss, formerly at Leominster Public Library, MACopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.