One Hundred Shoes, a new picture-book from Tony Ross (Andersen Press pound;9.99), features a centipede who decides to kit himself out with footwear after stubbing his toe. ‘Which one?’ Mum asks, wanting to kiss it better. It takes a while to find out. At the shoe shop he asks the salesman for 100 shoes, 50 left, 50 right. After putting them all on the next day, he has 58 shoes left over.
His grandpa knows why. “Most centipedes have only forty-two legs.” (A handy piece of foot-knowledge.) But even so, the centipede soon balks at the morning chore of having to sort out all those shoes and socks, so he flogs them, “to creepy-crawlies with fewer legs”. Try it in numeracy hour for number bonds to 100, partitioning of 100 and word problems based on footwear.
Ross fans will also rejoice at the reissue of the Martian-eye view of human life in Dr Xargle’s Book of Earthlets, by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross (Andersen pound;4.99).
