Counting on Community Board book – Picture Book, September 22, 2015

This was recommended to me by a friend. Beautiful artwork. Great messaging. Was a hot with the parents and the kid. Gonna buy a few more to have on stock and give to others.

The art and poetry in this inclusive yet simple counting book far exceeded my expectations. We also have the alphabet book A is for Activist. Highly recommend these books for young readers. My 1 and 3yo kids especially love them.

In my bid to raise my niece as a fierce and compassionate woman, I got her this book and it's partner "A is for Activist." The art work is lovely, and the message of solidarity and building a community is great. These books, like great kids board books, have the surface item (count how many ____ is on the page) and the background challenges. In this case, find the duck on every page. I enjoy reading it, and I hope she will too.

An excellent board book for young kids, with an emphasis on diversity and urban life and collaboration. The other book by this author, A is for Activist, is a tad too strident on certain pages for my tastes, but Counting on Community has the kind of positive messages I want to impart to my kid.

Bright and interesting pictures accompany one to 10 objects to count found when people in a community band together. I particularly like the pot luck spread. Right now my 18-month old granddaughter is especially concentrating on learning numbers but I can see that there is more to learn about such objects as a piñata, after she has mastered counting so the book will be valuable for several years.

Love the book and the premise but I was a little confused by one of the pages. Amazon didn't offer a "look inside" option for this book like it did for the author's other book, A For Activist. Because I liked the art and style of A for Activist so much, I decided to just add this book to the order despite not being able to see inside.Not all the pages have the number clearly printed in a predictable way for children to recognize - something I initially overlooked when I received it because it seems challenging to hunt down the message on each page and probably useful for them to recognize the many different forms that numbers come in. Upon further inspection, there are just several very confusing aspects of this book. While I love the art, it is definitely not your standard number book.The number two page references "neighbor friends" but there are 6 people on the page (all mostly in groups of two, all of them potentially "neighbor friends"). Two kids playing in the street, two parents, two babies in strollers. There are also two cars, two trees, two shadows, two birds.The number 5 page has 5 chunks of chalk clearly piled right in the foreground of the picture, under the text. But wait! There's one more chunk of chalk in the child's hand. That makes 6 chunks of chalk on the page. And this will be important later.The number 7 page is the most confusing of all. The text reads "Seven bikes and scooters and helmets to share". I have a lot to say about this page. First. There are 5 bikes and scooters in a pile with one helmet. So you've got 6. But there is also a kid away from the pile riding a scooter and wearing a helmet. So add those and you've got 8. My husband and I have tried and tried and we just can't get a total of 7 anything on this page. I also think it's worth noting that if there are x number of bikes and scooters "to share" there should be that number of helmets as well but I'm more concerned with the fact that there's not a total of 7 things on the number 7 page. I will include a picture of it for your review.The 8 page has 8 picket signs. These "signs" are blank pieces of paper. Just 8 white rectangles situated throughout a mass of people in the foreground of the picture. If you were only looking at the foreground, that would be fine, but all the pages in this book leading up to this one have taught us to hunt down what we are looking for including sometimes stretching the imagination or including things that we did not perceive to be part of the picture. If you look in the background of the image, there are several people with actual picket signs that say things. So there are actually way more than 8 picket signs on the 8 page.Overall, I give the book 4 stars because I value the art and the conversation-with-child aspect of evaluating what is on each page but I feel like as a fundamental numbers book, it is lacking in clarity and consistency and I just couldn't give it 5 stars.

We give this book and A is for Activist to every baby we know!

I love Nagara's books! My daughter and I read this Counting on Community and A is for Activism about once a day. They are really engaging and important books to read with your little ones and older kids/family members as well. My boyfriend cried the first time he heard me reading A is for Activism to our daughter.