Parents' Guide to Goodnight, Numbers

Warm fuzzy families of various races with fully engaged dads help distinguish this bedtime counting book targeted to toddler- and preschool-age kids, as pictured in the art. Goodnight, Numbers provides scads of opportunities for kids to count objects, as the pages move from 1 to 10. Some of the counting opportunities are called out in the rhyming text, with others scattered throughout the art so readers get to hunt for them.

Though there are lots of counting books, this one's a bedtime book, with the kids moving through nightly rituals and saying goodnight to the counted objects, a la Goodnight Moon. That classic book is a hard act to follow, and these rhymes do not flow as trippingly off the tongue. The publisher's recommended age starts at 2, but parents might keep in mind that the concept of numbers is developmental, and very young kids might have trouble getting the one-to-one correspondence of number-to-object just right. They'd do well to take the advice that author Danica McKellar offers at the end and supplement the book by having kids count concrete objects in the real world. But Alicia Padrón's art is so sweetly appealing that kids will enjoy practicing on the objects in the art as they begin to learn to count.