A Million Dots

What I love is that this book helps visualize one million and just how large of a number it is. We hear facts daily like "people use over 500 million plastic straws a day" and after reading this book, it's easier to realize just how crazy a number that is. I'm a substitute teacher and this is one of the books I keep in my subbing bag. It's great because even if I don't have time to read the entire book to a class, the number facts are interesting.

Although I'm not sure I could come up with a MILLION reasons why I like this book so much, here are a few.1) Kids are FASCINATED with big numbers and the idea of a million dots running throughout the entire book is very appealing. I'm sure there will be some brave souls determined to count them all. (SPOILER: Clements does tell us it would take eleven and a half days to count each dot, one by one. This could be the perfect book for the kids when traveling across the country!)2) This isn't just page after page of boring ol' dots. Instead, Clements uses them as a background for some nifty self-imposed images, which are quite whimsical and appealing to the eye.3) Each page keeps a running total of the dots seen so far - how cool is that?4) Each page also features a random dot number (which could be found on each particular page, if you are so inclined to count) and a fact connected with that number. For example: DOT NUMBER 134,000 - "A person blinks about 134,000 times each week." DOT NUMBER 464,000 - "It would take 464,000 school-lunch cartons of chocolate milk to fill a 20 x 40 ft. swimming pool. (Please pass the straws.)" And my personal favorite....DOT NUMBER 675,000 - "Like chocolate? To eat 675,000 Hershey's bars, you would have to eat one bar every two minutes, nonstop, for more than 234 days!"5) The colorful illustrations in this book add so much, because without them, well, we're just looking at.......dots.6) So many great random facts - perfect for impressing all your friends.7) The millionth dot even gets its own page!

1 fact on the numerous facts on numbers is 186,282 is the exact speed of light per second.

I bought this book to use in my second grade classroom. The kids love it! They enjoy the artwork and the interesting facts presented on each page. This book is a real winner!

Wonderful book for teching children to understand the concept of one million - whether it be people, money, cars, etc. The book arrived promptly and I am more than pleased with the purchase and transaction.

The main goal of the book is to show readers what 1 million dots look like. It’s trying to help people understand what 1 million is. This is fine. The book starts out interestingly by showing small groups of dots, but then it actually goes into showing the 1 million dots. Apparently 1 million dots can’t be displayed on a single page, so it disperses the dots over quite a few pages. As it shows these million dots, it puts paintings and other art behind the dots, obscuring the dots so it’s hard to see them. And then all around the dots they put facts about the current number of dots they have shown so far.I personally just didn’t care. Rather than focus on the dots, they focused on the trivia. I would have preferred that they just show the dots. Perhaps they could have used stippled drawings which had one million dots in each. With computers it’s something that is possible. Instead they shoved the real focus of their book to the side and focused on unimportant trivia.The book was a good idea not very well expressed.

My second grader read this book with great interest as did I. It's filled with interesting facts and delightful pictures made up of dots. However, I tried to read it to a kindergartener and it did not work. It's not a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's pictures with random facts. A reader will have to understand concepts of hundreds and thousands and minutes and hours.

This book disappointed me. It really does have a million dots, which I’d hoped would help me visualize such a large number. But it doesn’t do that very well. The problem is graphical. The first few spreads start off cheerfully and clearly, with one dot, then 10, then 100 and so on, surrounded by lots of open space. The open space makes the dots easy to see and visualize. But after that, each spread of dots appears atop two big illustrations, which oddly defeats the effect; one loses the sense of immense numbers and sees only cute illustrations covered in vague halftones. Pretty soon one barely notices the dots at all, which of course is the point of the book. How to correct this would be an interesting graphical challenge, but I’ll leave that for the illustrator. In the meantime, I can’t recommend it.

Excellent book for learning about big numbers.

Really clever book, pictures made up of dots that show how vast the bigger numbers are, my Grandson absolutely loves it

This book was hard to find in stores so it was great to be able to find it online! I use this for an introduction to number sense in my classroom!