Charts for Babies
Review posted June 5, 2026.
Abrams Appleseed, 2026. 36 pages.
Review written June 2, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review
This book makes my mathematical heart happy! Mind you, I'm the mom who, frustrated when grading third-semester calculus papers, taught my small children the chain rule of calculus. (Just the pattern, not anything about the concepts behind it.)
This book, too, gives small children some patterns - and maybe they'll notice some concepts. But that's kind of not the point.
It's all light and happy with pages in rainbow colors and rhyming text. And we see things in charts. Here are a couple of examples of the text in spreads:
This is wide.
This is narrow.
This is a line.
This is an arrow.
And of course that's accompanied by an appropriate chart. Here's another:
This is a block.
This is a stack.
This is a duck.
The duck says, "Quack Quack!"
The charts are all pretty much that simple, with some excuses to give hugs at the end.
And then on the final end papers, we get a key to the types of charts used - in a chart: Venn diagram, column chart, dumbbell chart, area chart, scatter plot, bubble chart, matrix, pie chart, bar chart, sound wave chart, timeline, decision tree, line chart, concentric diagram, spiral graph, and key. That last box is wonderfully self-referential.
So you see - they will learn something! It's all clever and fun. What is a chart, after all, but a visual representation of something, a way to understand it at a glance? I always love a read-aloud that parents will enjoy, too, and this one is 100% fun!