WUMBERS by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld

I was thrilled to receive a review copy of WUMBERS from Chronicle Books. I am a huge Amy Krouse Rosenthal fan and love the fun that she has with words. The heading of the press release says, "GR8 NEW BOOK IS 1DERFULLY SILLY".  The entire book is told using numbers as parts of words as in the press release heading.  Each page sets the scene and the words and numbers work together to tell the story.  Reading the book feels like solving a riddle and I can see kids having a great time playing with this kind of writing once they read this book.  The author/illustrator team say that the book was inspired by William Steig's C D B! book so it would be fun to pair these. This seems like a great time for a book like this because kids see so much of this kind of word play in their lives with texting, Twitter, etc.

One of my favorite parts of this book are the endpages. There are several talking bubbles with questions for readers using numbers/words to ask the questions. For example, one of my favorites is, "Are you usually prompt or do you 10d 2 be l8 and keep others w8ing?"  Even the dedication, the author bios and the title page include fun with word/number combinations!

I love the whole idea of this book and can't wait to share it with kids. I'll keep it with my word play books but I think it will be a good one to use early in the school year when we are learning about keeping a writer's notebook. Playing with words like this is a fun thing that I think lots of kids might want to try if given the invitation.  It will be fun to see what they come up with!