I love anything by Mitsumasa Anno, and some of his books are more for adults than children (or, happily, both). This is a lovely tale for children, born of his imagination....What if there was a coffee cup as big as a tank, and he started magining huge things.

But then some things are perfect as they are - small. The tulip the King grows in a giant flower pot makes him realise that maybe biggest isn't always best.

Anno's illustrations are beautifully realised and the tale well-told - a delight for children from about 3 onwards.

I work in a library, and I came across this book reshelving children's books. As I am fascinated with anything and everything Japanese, the instant I noticed the kanji symbols on the page I simply had to check it out. Bring poetry into the picture and I was absolutely captured.

With its side-by-side translations of the poems, this is a clever introduction to Japanese culture, though the only purpose the kanji serve is for show-there's not a lot a four-year-old can do with a poem written entirely in Japanese, much less fourteen. I'd place the listening level for this book at around ages 2 - 6, and the reading level a couple years higher. The poems are simple and relate well to a child's imagination. A stanza from "Let's Play Together" illustrates this: "Wouldn't it be nice\If a baby elephant\Came to my house,\Saying, 'Let's play together.'\Wouldn't it be nice,\ Mommy?"

The illustrations were best described by Publisher's Weekly: "The milk-white paper cuts on beige pages sustain a tone of classic simplicity which is echoed in the poems." While the translations are best described by the School Library Journal: "The translations...refreshingly retain Japanese onomatopoeia instead of substituting more familiar English equivalents."

This is a good example of children's poetry-real poetry, not just a book written in rhyme simply because the author thinks of him or herself as a poet. But then again, a parent might consider the book's best asset to be its brevity, as a couple of poems might be good substitute for a bedtime story. Seeing as the last poem in the book is called "Good morning and good night," this may have been the author's intent all along.

Anno does an excellent job of introducing statistical combinations and permutation in a story that is suited to both young and senior students. Anno's color coding clearly shows the difference between permutations and combinations. The visuals are very helpful as supplementary material for intoducing these math concepts or as an aid to struggling students. In the story, Socrates' fat wife wants to be fed, but Socrates is lazy. He sits with his friend Plato and tries to calculate his best move. The pages are filled with pictures of the 3 pigs and the pigs' houses as these two thinkers consider all the possibilities.

Detailed, pen and ink drawings with no text depict our hero's journey through Britain. Landing his boat near the White Cliffs of Dover, he travels on horseback north through England and Scotland visiting well known cities and towns along the way. This free format book allows the parent to create the journey with the child highlighting British history, historic sights and literture depicted on each page. Scenes include Salisbury, Stonehenge, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, scenes from Shakespeare, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Picadilly Circus and so forth on through the country side. This book is best suited for parents who have some knowledge of Britain, its history, sites and literature, or could be a starting point for some easy research with an illustrated travel guide. I discovered this book at the doctor's office waiting room and liked it enough to search for it.

I'd never had much to do with wordless books, but you cannot see one of Mitsumasa Anno's beautiful works without becoming an enthusiastic devotee of the genre in general, and Anno in particular. It's too bad these books are out-of-print -- at least one should be in every child's library!

As in other Anno works, an anonymous Everyman is seen in each textless pen-and-ink two-page spread. In this book, the traveler rows ashore near the Cliffs of Dover, buys a horse near a small village, and rides through progressively more populated scenes -- and what scenes they are! Filled with historical and literary allusions, mini-stories, children playing, panorama and touching detail -- all at the same time! It would take a long time to describe even one illustration, let alone the whole book, but the content is rich and evocative. Your child will appreciate this work at various comprehension levels at different times, and you yourself will make new discoveries with each viewing.

These books are not to be missed, and Anno's Britain is very beautiful.

The Animals by Michio Mado touched me personally when I took it out of the school library. In few words I sensed Mado's feeling for nature. ' Little Bird' movingly talks of touching the little bird with your eye. What an original way of expressing a delicate intrusion into the bird's space. 'Little Elephant' will be a great model for small children to write their own poems. 'Zebra' is so clever and humourous. 'Girafffe' actually makes you hold your breath at that chance encounter with a stranger.

I used this collection of poems in my TESOL Expressive Arts Course and enjoyed hearing the rhythm of the Japanese. My MA High School teacher students responded well to the collection. ... A poem is like any work of art, be it music, painting or writing, it does not appeal to everyone. To me there was a wonder and love of nature implicit in every poem. Bravo, Michio Mado, and thank you!

The Amimals by Michio Mado is a wonderful collection of animal poems. Each poem is short, but concrete. The design of the book is fabulous. Not to colorful, but pleasing to the eye. I have always love poetry! Especially animal poetry. This collection is a materpiece. A must have for anyone who collects "true" poetry! Again, this author is extremly talented,and I must add, the illustrator did a fantastic job with the art work.

Love Mitsumasa Anno's other books, but the wonderful intricate drawings are missing from this book, and the story is easily 60% too long, especially for children.

Anno's Magic Seeds is yet another book written by Mitsumasa Anno that integrates literature with mathematics. This book is a useful tool for teachers attempting to provide a connection of math in the real world for their students. The story is enchanting and it certainly proved to be a creative way for beginning a math lesson- atleast it was for my 4th graders! I highly recommend this or any of Anno's books to stimulate children's interest in mathematics!

Anno's books are great for teaching fun math lessons. I readthe book to my sixth graders and had them figure the answers to thequestions as we went. They loved it! They really have to listen carefully, so it makes a great lesson in listening skills as well.

About me: I helped edit Arthur Engel's Exploring Mathematics With Your Computer and other math books.

I looked forward to seeing a book presenting to the very young simple math ideas which are outside the school curriculum. I leave it to librarians and teachers to say how children react to this book; what I wish to point out are two instances where the mathematical knowledge conveyed by the author, not to mention of the editors and translators, is below par.

On p. 16-17 we see perspective views of two walls of a house which have on them pictures whose true shapes are squares. One needs no expertise to see that something about these views is wrong. The laws of perspective enable one to say what it is. If you hold a camera straight and take a picture of a vertical square on a wall, the images of the horizontal sides can not be longer than the longer vertical side image. In the book they are much longer!

A written discussion of pespective is in fact too difficult for early elementary grades. The proper way to discuss images with young children is by producing images of objects with a camera obscura, a box with a pinhole or lens in the middle of one side and frosted glass on the other. The LCD screen of a digital camera could also be used, except that it is too small and delicate.

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A later section of the book is devoted to the following kind of puzzle. Can we walk in one stretch along every block of every street of a village exactly once? Leonhard Euler pointed out, first, that this is impossible if there are more than 2 junctions where an odd number of streets come together, and second, that it is otherwise possible.

The first statement can be derived in a way which even a third grader can understand. Every time we pass through a junction, two more of the blocks which meet at the junction become traversed. Thus, at a junction other than where we start or end our walk, we can finish off all the blocks only if the number meeting at the junction is even.

The author devotes a number of pages to this puzzle but misses the opportunity to present Euler's simple but ingenious argument. Worse than that, he misquotes Euler by saying the walk is impossible if there are more than 3 odd junctions. This is true but does not imply that the walk is impossible on Euler's original example, the figure on the left of p. 66, which has 3 odd junctions.