Rooster’s Off to See the World

"One fine morning, a rooster decided he wanted to travel." In strikingly designed, colorful collage illustrations and a beguiling simple text, Eric Carle takes his young readers on a trip with the rooster and his companions. As he travels, the rooster is joined by two cats, three frogs, four turtles and five fish, offering the child a graphic introduction to the meaning of numbers, number sets and addition within the context of an entertaining story. When night falls, the rooster's friends find he has made no provisions for their food or shelter and, disappointed, they abandon the expedition -- once again in sets of five, four, three and two, but this time in a declining series. Finally the rooster, too, decides that he has seen enough of the world and that he is, in fact, a little bit homesick.

Eric Carle believes in letting children make learning discoveries at their own pace. This book can be read and enjoyed for its story and its beautiful illustrations alone; however, the child who is ready to begin to think mathematically will find additional pleasures in the opportunities presented in the text, the pictures and the diagrams for learning basic arithmetic concepts.

Eric Carle is an internationally bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator of more than seventy books for very young children, including The Tiny Seed, Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, and his most well-known title, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Born in Syracuse, New York, Eric Carle moved to Germany with his parents when he was six years old. He studied at the prestigious art school, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, in Stuttgart, before returning to the United States, where he worked as a graphic designer for TheNew York Times and later as art director for an advertising agency. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, now considered a modern classic, has sold nearly fifty million copies and has been translated into sixty-five languages. With his late wife, Barbara, Eric Carle cofounded The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2002. Eric Carle lives in the Florida Keys.