How Many Jelly Beans?

by Andrea Menotti, Yancey Labat (Illustrator)

Overview

How many jelly beans are enough? How many are too many? Aiden and Emma can't decide. Is 10 enough? How about 1,000? That's a lot of jelly beans. But eaten over a whole year, it's only two or three a day. This giant picture book offers kids a fun and easy way to understand large numbers. Starting with 10, each page shows more and more colorful candies, leading up to a giant fold-out surprise—ONE MILLION JELLY BEANS! With bright illustrations and an irresistible extra-large format, How Many Jelly Beans? makes learning about big numbers absolutely scrumptious!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452102061
Publisher:	Chronicle Books
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Pages:	28
Product dimensions:	11.00(w) x 14.10(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	4 - 7 Years

About the Author

Andrea Menotti is a parent, author, former teacher, and book editor. She and Yancey Labat live in Ithaca, New York, with their daughter.

Yancey Labat got his start at Marvel Comics and has illustrated many books for children, including the Worst-Case Scenario Ultimate Adventure series.

Editorial Reviews

This utterly delightful oversize book takes on big numbers, using jelly beans as counters. When Emma and Aiden are asked how many jelly beans they want, they carry on a boasting match, resulting in escalating amounts of candy (“He can have twenty? I’ll have twenty-five!”). Five hundred beans cover a coffee table, and 1,000 beans are divided out over the days of a year on calendar pages. The bright jelly beans are one of the few sources of color in Labat’s loosely sketched spreads, which culminate in a jaw-dropping 10-panel foldout finale for one million jelly beans. Next stop: the dentist. Ages 4–8. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Bright illustrations and a sassy text add up to serious fun" - Education.com

"For all our obsessive teaching of the basic digits, children are still mostly fascinated with the really big ones, the millions, zillions and gajillions - something this ingenious jumbo-size book delivers"- The New York Times

" Utterly delightful " - Publishers Weekly , Starred Review

"This fresh approach to huge numbers should get kids thinking big time" - Booklist, Starred Review

"An eminently child-friendly exploration of an ever-intriguing subject" - Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Gr 2–5—Emma and Aiden begin a competition when asked how many jelly beans they would like. One asks for 10, the other asks for 20, then 25, and on through the hundreds, thousands, to a million. The actual number of jelly beans is displayed on each page in bright hues. As the quantities get larger, the beans get smaller and smaller, eventually making it impossible to count them individually but the math concepts are clear by comparing the masses. The children have fun adding, dividing, and comparing numbers of jelly beans to the height of a building. When they reach one million (an impressive 20-page gatefold), they concede that it's too many for any child to handle. Labat's artwork consists of bold black cartoon sketches and large expressive speech bubbles. Reminiscent of David M. Schwartz's How Much Is a Million? (HarperCollins, 1985), this book will help children grasp the concept of large numbers in a playful way. The gatefold gives an accurate account of what one million looks like but it is difficult to unfold and refold, and it requires an adult's assistance to prevent tearing. This oversize book is sure to catch the eye of curious kids and hold their attention.—Diane Antezzo, Ridgefield Library, CT

School Library Journal

Jellybean-fueled sibling rivalry leads readers on a visual exploration of large numbers. Emma's request for 10 is reasonable, as is Aiden's for 20, but, auction-style, the numbers soon mount from 100 to 500, at which point Emma calls Aiden's bluff. "That's too many. You can't eat five hundred jelly beans." Well, he could eat 1,000 in a year, but that's just two or three per day. How about 5,000 in a year? That would be a stack that's as high as a 10-story building. As the two ponder this existential conundrum, the numbers keep going up, from 10,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000. Labat's black-and-white digital illustrations make the bright colors of the ever-increasing jellybeans stand out and pop off the pages. The speech bubbles, clean lines and efficiently drawn characters speak to his start in comics. The page depicting how Aiden would divvy 100,000 jellybeans among the different flavors works especially well, picturing single-color circles clearly labeled with the differing amounts (there's only one lemon jellybean). This helps readers learn to estimate, though Bruce Goldstone's Great Estimations and Greater Estimations (2006, 2008) offer more specific examples. An eminently child-friendly exploration of an ever-intriguing subject; pair it with David M. Schwartz and Steven Kellogg's How Much Is a Million. (Math picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews