Ten Apples Up On Top!

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Overview

A lion, a dog, and a tiger are having a contest—can they get ten apples piled up on top of their heads? You better believe it! This first counting book works as a teaching tool as well as a funny story.
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More About This Book

Overview

A lion, a dog, and a tiger are having a contest—can they get ten apples piled up on top of their heads? You better believe it! This first counting book works as a teaching tool as well as a funny story.
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Editorial Reviews

Children's Literature - Marilyn Courtot
When Theodore Suess Geisel wrote books that others illustrated, he use the pen name LeSieg, which is his own name spelled backwards. This typical Dr. Seuss story has three animals all competing with each other to see who can balance the most apples on his head. In addition to the amusing actions, kids also learn to count from 1 to 10. McKie's illustrations offer plenty of humor in their own right.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780394800196
  • Publisher: Random House Children's Books
  • Publication date: 3/28/1961
  • Series: I Can Read It All By Myself Beginner Books Series
  • Edition description: Reissue
  • Pages: 58
  • Sales rank: 35,428
  • Age range: 3 - 7 Years
  • Product dimensions: 6.82 (w) x 9.28 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, 1904.  After attending Dartmouth College and Oxford University, he began a career in advertising.  His advertising cartoons, featuring Quick, Henry, the Flit!,  appeared in several leading American magazines.  Dr. Seuss's first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, hit the market in 1937, and the world of children's literature was changed forever!  In 1957, Seuss's The Cat in the Hat became the prototype for one of Random House's best-selling series, Beginner Books.  This popular series combined engaging stories with outrageous illustrations and playful sounds to teach basic reading skills.  Brilliant, playful, and always respectful of children, Dr. Seuss charmed his way into the consciousness of four generations of youngsters and parents.  In the process, he helped kids learn to read.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and three Academy Awards, Seuss was the author and illustrator of 44 children's books, some of which have been made into audiocassettes, animated television specials, and videos for children of all ages.  Even after his death in 1991, Dr. Seuss continues to be the best-selling author of children's books in the world.  

Biography

Now that generations of readers have been reared on The Cat in the Hat and Fox in Socks, it's easy to forget how colorless most children's books were before Dr. Seuss reinvented the genre. When the editorial cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1936, the book was turned down by 27 publishers, many of whom said it was "too different." Geisel was about to burn his manuscript when it was rescued and published, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, by a college classmate.

Over the next two decades, Geisel concocted such delightfully loopy tales as The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Horton Hears a Who. Most of his books earned excellent reviews, and three received Caldecott Honor Awards. But it was the 1957 publication of The Cat in the Hat that catapulted Geisel to celebrity.

Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read, along with a related Life magazine article, had recently charged that children's primers were too pallid and bland to inspire an interest in reading. The Cat in the Hat, written with 220 words from a first-grade vocabulary list, "worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane and Spot," as Ellen Goodman wrote in The Detroit Free Press. With its vivid illustrations, rhyming text and topsy-turvy plot, Geisel's book for beginning readers was anything but bland. It sold nearly a million copies within three years.

Geisel was named president of Beginner Books, a new venture of Random House, where he worked with writers and artists like P.D. Eastman, Michael Frith, Al Perkins, and Roy McKie, some of whom collaborated with him on book projects. For books he wrote but didn't illustrate, Geisel used the pen name Theo LeSieg (LeSieg is Geisel spelled backwards).

As Dr. Seuss, he continued to write bestsellers. Some, like Green Eggs and Ham and the tongue-twisting Fox in Socks, were aimed at beginning readers. Others could be read by older children or read aloud by parents, who were often as captivated as their kids by Geisel's wit and imagination. Geisel's visual style appealed to television and film directors, too: The animator Chuck Jones, who had worked with Geisel on a series of Army training films, brought How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to life as a hugely popular animated TV special in 1966. A live-action movie starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch was released in 2000.

Many Dr. Seuss stories have serious undertones: The Butter Battle Book, for example, parodies the nuclear arms race. But whether he was teaching vocabulary words or values, Geisel never wrote plodding lesson books. All his stories are animated by a lively sense of visual and verbal play. At the time of his death in 1991, his books had sold more than 200 million copies. Bennett Cerf, Geisel's publisher, liked to say that of all the distinguished authors he had worked with, only one was a genius: Dr. Seuss.

Good To Know

The Cat in the Hat was written at the urging of editor William Spaulding, who insisted that a book for first-graders should have no more than 225 words. Later, Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write a book with just 50 words. Geisel won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, though to his recollection, Cerf never paid him the $50.

Geisel faced another challenge in 1974, when his friend Art Buchwald dared him to write a political book. Geisel picked up a copy of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! and a pen, crossed out each mention of the name "Marvin K. Mooney," and replaced it with "Richard M. Nixon." Buchwald reprinted the results in his syndicated column. Nine days later, President Nixon announced his resignation.

The American Heritage Dictionary says the word "nerd" first appeared in print in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo / A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!" The word "grinch," after the title character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as a killjoy or spoilsport.

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    1. Also Known As:
      Theodor Seuss Geisel (full name); also: Theo LeSieg, Rosetta Stone
    1. Date of Birth:
      March 2, 1904
    2. Place of Birth:
      Springfield, Massachusetts
    1. Date of Death:
      September 4, 1991
    2. Place of Death:
      La Jolla, California

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Sort by: Showing all of 11 Customer Reviews

  • Posted August 25, 2011

    Very Educational

    This is a good book for teachers or parents who are trying to teach children ages 2-5 how to count to ten. It is an educational book that teaches kids how to share and play with other children. The book that I received only had four colors, not including black and white, and the pictures were very simple and plain. Therefore, if you are trying to catch the attention of little ones, you will need to use your voice and enthusiasm to keep the young ones at the edge of their seats and engaged. Also, there are only 75 simple words in the whole book, so the kids may be able to recite it and read it back to you. Overall, it is a good book and I recommend it if you are wanting material to help your children learn.

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  • Posted March 21, 2010

    Another indispensable Seuss classic for toddlers

    This is another excellent book to read aloud with a toddler, it is currently my 2 year old's favorite. This one even has a bit of a plot as the one-up-man-ship of the apple-balancers escalates. Very good for teaching counting to ten.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 7, 2010

    I am confused.

    Cannot rate, did not order this.

    0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 4, 2009

    My son likes it.

    My 3 years son chose this book at a store. He enjoys counting the apples. This book is small and handy to carry!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 20, 2001

    One-Ups-Creatureship Balancing Act to Help with Counting!

    This book is a tour de force for helping with reading and counting to ten, using a vocabulary of only 75 words! A lion, dog, and tiger find many interesting ways to balance ten apples vertically on their heads, building up from only one. Then the birds decide they would like the apples, and the fun really begins. The conclusion will leave your child giggling happily. Most simple books try to teach only counting or reading. I found it to be a great idea to combine the two. It makes the task both easier and more interesting for your child. By using only 75 words, there is much repetition to help your youngster identify words that she or he will reuse throughout life. Here is an example: 'One apple up on top! Two apples up on top!' The illustrations nicely cue the young person to the words and the numbers involved. With these words I have quoted, you see the lion with the requisite number of apples balanced on top of the head. The illustrations are also very active, and help draw interest to the story. Mr. Roy McKie's colorful, dynamic illustrations bring the story to life. Otherwise, how interesting can a counting book be? Most children will have no trouble memorizing this story. Then, they can 'read' along as you read aloud. Later, you can stop for certain words that they know how to identify, and they can read that word as part of the sentence you are reading aloud. You can also encourage them to count the number of apples aloud on each creature's head. You can extend the value of this book by adding some pages of your own that involve numbers beyond ten. Your child will enjoy helping your with the illustrations for those pages. With the simple text structure, you cannot help but match what Dr. Seuss would have written (writing here under his pen name of Theo. Le Sieg -- the reverse of his real last name). As an adult, I also encourage you to consider creating other books for your children to learn from. You could take this same structure, and introduce other nouns as well. Beyond that, you could also use this structure (with tiny amendments) to teach new verbs. By adding only a few dozen words, you can greatly expand your child's ability to enjoy stories! Keep it simple, and everything can be understood! Donald Mitchell, co-author of The Irresistible Growth Enterprise and The 2,000 Percent Solution

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    Posted August 21, 2010

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