"The buggy-eyed insects, crabs, and snails provide an appealing cast of characters who stand up to be counted against a summertime palette of orange sand and blue skies." — Kirkus Reviews
If one is a snail and two is a person, we must be counting by feet! Just follow the sign to the beach, where a bunch of fun-loving crabs, lounging dogs, gleeful insects, and bewildered-looking snails obligingly offer their feet for counting in a number of silly, surprising combinations — from one to one hundred!
April Pulley Sayre and Jeff Sayre are a husband-and-wife team who lead ecotours and travel extensively to study, photograph, and videotape animals in the rain forests of Panama, Madagascar, and Ecuador. They also speak at schools, botanical gardens, zoos, and nature festivals. Together they wrote a natural history book for adults. Jeff Sayre is an ecologist specializing in native plants and birds. April Pulley Sayre is an award-winning author of more than forty books for children. The Sayres love to brainstorm and laugh together - which is how the idea for ONE IS A SNAIL came about.
Randy Cecil graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and is the illustrator of numerous books for children. He says of ONE IS A SNAIL, "It was great fun to figure out how these strange creatures would react in all these different combinations. Crabs seem to have the best time together!"
Seeing patterns and different ways of calculation are standard concepts of mathematical reasoning, but there is nothing standard about this creative counting book . . . The buggy-eyed insects, crabs, and snails provide an appealing cast of characters who stand up to be counted against a summertime palette of orange sand and blue skies.
—Kirkus Reviews
This husband-and-wife team (HUMMINGBIRDS: THE SUN CATCHERS) puts a beach community's best feet forward and simultaneously explores the myriad ways that numbers can combine.
—Publishers Weekly
Quite simply, this provides little arithmeticians with something they'll actually get a kick out of counting. . . . All groupings are arranged for easy enumeration by kids not quite ready to make the leap to intuitive multiplication.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)
