Ready, Set, 100th Day!

Nancy Elizabeth Wallace uses cut paper, scissors, and a glue stick to prepare her three-dimensional colorful artwork. Nancy is the author of a number of picture books, including Seeds! Seeds! Seeds!, Recycle Every Day!, Pumpkin Day!, The Valentine Express, and Alphabet House. She lives in Branford, Connecticut with her husband, Peter.

“Ages 4-8 Minna the rabbit is back, and this time she is trying to come up with a creative idea for her Ready! Set! One Hundred! project. Minna tries out lots of ideas for celebrating the 100th day of school, but none seems just right. With her little brother, Pip, she makes 20 groups of fives with Popsicle sticks. Finding inspiration on her art shelves, Minna uses 10 different paper punches to make 10 groups of 10. Next, she and Pip use five different colors of pom-poms to make groups of 20. Minna’s mom helps her with paper-clip groups of 25, and her dad helps with two piles of 50 using shaped pasta. But not one of these is unusual enough to suit Minna, so she decides to use all of them. The result is an imaginative collage for Minna and a seek-and-find counting exercise for readers. Back matter pictorially summarizes the different groups Minna made and lists the sets she used in her final picture so readers can check their answers. Wallace’s artwork, rendered in cut paper, photographs and colored pencil, nicely mirrors Minna’s creative process. Children will have no difficulty practicing their skip counting, thanks to the clear layout of the sets. Likely to inspire kids to count and group their own household items, this is great math practice in a creative package.” —Kirkus Reviews“Ages 4-8 Young Minna enlists the family’s help in coming up with a unique way to display the number 100 to her class. She makes 20 piles of 5 sticks, 10 rows of 10 stickers, 5 rows of 20 pom poms, and other combinations using pasta, paper clips, and punched shapes. But nothing is original enough for Minna. Her final masterpiece is a collage with a little bit of everything. This is definitely a book that will appeal to children. All of the characters are anthropomorphic brown rabbits done in large, colorful collages. The concepts are shown in a straightforward way that will be useful for introducing and reinforcing the number sets. The text is simple, with a sweet interaction between Minna and her preschooler brother. The final page includes a picture of the finished project, asking readers to find 10 of each item. This is an excellent choice for school librarians in particular. Teachers can use the book to pre-teach the concept and motivate children to find an original way to depict 100.” —School Library Journal, October Issue