These Rocks Count!

K-Gr 3—Mr. Tate's class takes a ranger-led hike to explore the world of geology in this mediocre effort, which reads more like a series of disjointed facts about rocks than as a story. Ranger Pedra invites the children to "listen with our eyes and hands" to a boulder's story, and then, inexplicably, it "tells" a counting story. The items being counted, whether they are four mounds of salt, five turtle hatchlings moving over the sand, or ten panes of glass, are never explicitly connected to the rocks and have nothing to do with the boulder itself. Though the class discussion later touches briefly on the use of rocks and minerals in everyday products, the text fails to make critical connections. The bright, flat cartoon illustrations are appealing enough, and an afterword offers more background information on rocks, but overall the narrative fails to support its title.—Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD