Joyously colored animals encourage young children to think mathematically through a simple, wordless number game in a special anniversary edition.

With classic Eric Carle illustrations of a variety of zoo animals, this wordless story helps children learn to count to 10. The colors are rich and vibrant, guaranteed to draw children back to the story time and time again. Kids will love seeing the classic animals, such as giraffes and monkeys, riding to the zoo via the ever-child-favorite steam engine.

Through clear pictures, kids can count from one to 10 in a couple of ways. First, each individual railcar holds a sequential number of animals, such as one elephant and two hippos. Second, the bottom of each page features an outlined drawing of the previous scenes and kids can count the railcars as well. The variety of animals and colors lets kids practice those skills too. Plus, each drawing contains a tiny mouse that kids will love trying to find.

Since there is no text, this is a great book for showing creativity and making up a story. When I read this book to Emily, the three-year-old that I nanny for, we used descriptive words to enhance the story, such as "big, hungry hippos" or "silly monkeys." She especially loved looking at the last page, which shows all the animals in their final destination - the zoo! She inspected that page for quite some time, picking out her favorite animals.

--Abby

My daughter is learning her numbers and animals so this book was perfect. Eric Carle illustrations are classic. We have several of his other books. The colors in this book are vibrant and flood the pages. Kenzie immediately opened it and started pointing at the animals (with her feet). Kenzie associated the Hippos in the book to the hippo on her pajamas and recognized the monkeys immediately.

--Elizabeth, Orange, CA