Can You Count to a Googol?

by Robert E. Wells, Robert E. Wells (Illustrator)

Overview

2000 Gold Seal Award, Oppenheim Toy Portfolio
A Best Book for Children 2001, Science Books & Film

You may be able to count all the way to one hundred, but have you ever counted to a googol? It's impossible! In this fun book of numbers, Robert E. Wells explores the wonderful world of zeros and tells how the googol came to be named.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807510612
Publisher:	Whitman, Albert & Company
Publication date:	01/01/2000
Series:	Wells of Knowledge Science Series
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	10.50(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.10(d)
Lexile:	AD770L (what's this?)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Robert E. Wells is the author and illustrator of many award-winning science books for children, including Can You Count to a Googol? and Why Do Elephants Need the Sun?. He lives with his wife in Washington.

Robert E. Wells is the author and illustrator of many award-winning science books for children, including Can You Count to a Googol? and Why Do Elephants Need the Sun?. He lives with his wife in Washington.

Editorial Reviews

2000 Gold Seal Award, Oppenheim Toy Portfolio
A Best Book for Children 2001, Science Books & Film

"Parents and teachers seeking ways to combine reading with math for young children will welcome this helpful book…the illustrations and the author's appeal to children's active imaginations make this book great for read-alouds and for encouraging kids to enjoy math."—Kirkus Reviews

"Good supplementary material for the math curriculum."—Booklist

From the Publisher

Gr 2-4-The author illustrates how our number system builds by powers of 10 and helps develop a concept of what those numbers mean. The initial illustrations are silly: a girl balances one banana on her nose; a monkey balances 10 bananas using limbs and tail; 100 eagles pull a basket of children through the sky. A more realistic sequence illustrates millions to billions. A large wooden crate is loaded with 1,000,000 dollar bills; 10 of these crates are loaded onto a flatbed trailer (10 x $1,000,000 or $10,000,000); 10 of the trailers are loaded onto a barge ($100,000,000); and a harbor is filled with 10 barges ($1,000,000,000). The author explains that a googol, the number with 100 zeros, is too big to illustrate. "If you counted every grain of sand on all the worlds' beaches, and every drop of water in all the oceans, that wouldn't even be CLOSE to a GOOGOL." Children are reminded that numbers go on forever by a rocket speeding off into space, accompanied by a trail of zeros. The switch from fanciful to factual in these examples is somewhat jarring, but the pen-and-acrylic cartoons do adequately illustrate the growing numbers. Though David M. Schwartz's How Much Is a Million? (Lothrop, 1985), with its consistent playful tone and imaginative number illustrations, is still a preferable choice, Wells's model of building numbers could be a useful addition.-Adele Greenlee, Bethel College, St. Paul, MN Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

School Library Journal