Somerville House has come out with yet another cleverly packaged kit created to teach young children specific skills. In this case, the skills are counting and identifying basic geometric shapes. Designed as a book, with spiral-bound thick glossy pages, the kit includes a plastic case with magnetic numbers and shapes as well as a metal insert on the back cover. Part of this insert is revealed through a large window in the centre of each page. Readers are invited to place numbers and shapes in the window as they follow a simple story line about a family preparing for their twins’ seventh birthday. As they cook, shop, and decorate for the party, they use objects whose number increases by one until 20 is reached. In addition to counting these objects, readers are encouraged to find similarly shaped objects in the illustrations.

While the writing is not very inspiring, Feldman’s colourful illustrations, on the other hand, will engage and hold the reader’s attention. Not only do the detailed Fimo pictures contain plenty of objects to count, they also provide material for vocabulary expansion. Pictures of a piñata, round cheeses with red casing, and slices of kiwi fruit are just a few of the objects that can be used by parents for discussions with their preschoolers. Given that this is a book for parents to use with their children, it is unfortunate that parents aren’t provided with more math activities at the end of the book. These might include having the child identify a number or shape by touch only or finding and counting shapes in their environment.