What Is Square?

by Maria Ferrari

For children learning their shapes, this jazzy, energetic rhyme, illustrated with vibrant photographs, makes a rhyming game out of what's square in the world.

Genres: Mathematics, Picture Books, Childrens

24 pages, Board Book

First published June 30, 1999

Reviews

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short, simple, and classic style picture book naming things that are square with an occasional small descriptor such as, 'a cold cube of ice,' and 'one checkerboard,... two alphabet blocks.' This book feels very classic, using realistic picture images of objects on a simple colored background. The end page and art style are reminiscent of an 'I spy' book, letting children point out the square images in the array of objects and showing incredible, often close-up detail of the items. I'd recommend to ages 5-7.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was good, for someone who is just begging to learn shapes. I see that it was originally published and that seems crazy to me. The pages were full of very vintage scholastic looking photographs of things shaped as squares. I could imagine this being from the eighties or even the seventies, but finding out that this was published when I graduated high school just seems antique.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

An introduction for young children to squares. The photographs and variety of objects are useful on their own, but could also be taken one step further by searching for those same objects throughout one's house and matching them.

[Miss Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real life square book where all the objects in the book are squares that you would see in real life. Loved the last page of find and seek. All age groups.

[Amy Holliday · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comments on the Story:
The story is simply a listing of things that are square. It reads very easily though because there is a great deal of alliteration and assonance. It doesn’t exactly rhyme but something about the rhythm and these other sound tools almost made me think that it did. It does also seem like the author is talking to the child and is excited about pointing out square objects, even the square patch on your knee!!

Recommended Uses for the Book:
This book would be great for reading at home repetitively with children to learn about things that are squares, but it would also be well used in a library setting. The pictures are quite large. For example, there is a page that asks, “can you find the square button?” Anyone at the story-time should eventually be able to see the big square button surrounded by little round ones. Thus, the children could get involved in pointing out the square objects with the reader. Also at the end there is a finding game to locate all the square objects on the page and once more this is big enough so that little children could see and get involved in the process of identifying pictures of square objects! I had fun doing so!

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like all the shapes in this book. I think it will take careful reading since many pages have lots of different shapes on them. Care should be taken to make sure the child is really seeing the shape being pointed out by the words.

[Tiffanni Dean]

Used to teach a lesson on shapes and where we find them.