A Million Dots
Review posted September 4, 2024.
Cicada Books Limited, 2019. 44 pages.
Review written March 24, 2020, from a library book.
Starred Review
Now you and your kids can both explore exponential growth!
The first spread of this book shows the numeral 1, the word one, and one dot – in this case, the graphic artist has made it the top of a tree.
The next spread: 1 + 1 = 2, two, and two green treetop-dots.
The next spread: 2 + 2 = 4, four, and now the dots are smaller, four red apples.
Each time you turn the page, the number of dots you can see doubles and the dots get smaller. And the artist makes pictures out of them. The picture on the front cover with dots as freckles is the picture for 256.
When it gets to 524, 288, it takes a long fold-out page to show all the dots, even though they’re very small, and they’re even smaller on the other side with 1,048,576 dots.
I love the idea of this, because I’m a firm believer that people simply don’t understand how big a million is. In fact, I’ve got a little problem with using the 256 picture on the cover, because children might think that’s a million dots. And once it does show a million, the dots are so small my old eyes aren’t even sure which parts of the picture are dots and which aren’t. You couldn’t really explain it from the front of a room in storytime.
So for storytimes, I still prefer How Many Jelly Beans?, by Andrea Menotti, which also has a fun story to go along with the big numbers. But for kids to explore and wonder over the numbers by themselves or in small groups? This book is marvelous.
And this is a good time to try to understand that when you’re talking exponential growth, numbers get big very, very quickly.