TANGLED: A story about shapes by Anne Miranda & Eric Comstock

Happy New Year! I’m starting off Perfect Picture Book Friday this year with a story about shapes. As an educator, I especially liked how this rhyming book includes both 2-D and 3-D shapes.

Summary from Amazon:

When the neighborhood shapes go climbing on the park jungle gym the last thing they expect is a tangle. First the circle, next the triangle and then the square. One by one soon all sixteen shapes are trapped. They push and pull and tumble and cry for help. Who will save them? One special shape can set the others free. Can you guess which one it is? This charming story makes learning the names of sixteen shapes as easy as a day in the park.

Tangled: A Story About Shapes was written by Anne Miranda and illustrated by Eric Comstock. It was published in 2019 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Opening:   

  

One day, a little circle, just as happy as could be,

Got caught inside a jungle gym and couldn’t wiggle free.

My Thoughts as a Writer:

This is a fun rhyming book. I don’t write rhyme, but it’s nice to see how rhymes can be used when telling a complete story with a problem and solution.

The illustrations show flat 2-D shapes as well as shaded sides to show the 3-D shapes. The expressions on the faces of the shapes are great and really help to show their feelings. As some other reviewers have pointed out, it would have been nice if the circle character wasn’t referred to as female and coloured pink with a bow. Questions I had: Why do the shapes need a gender? Why does the girl need to be rescued? 

My Thoughts as an Educator:

This book is a good introduction to shapes. Since it includes both 2-D and 3-D shapes, it’s allows for some interesting discussions about them. I thought that including the jungle gym was clever, since children will relate to similar structures on their playground (and maybe even the experience of momentarily being caught in the structure) and it also reminded me of classroom activities for building shapes using sticks and modeling clay.  There's a great chart on the endpapers that shows many different shapes.

Ages: 4-8

Grades: PreK – 2

Themes: shapes, problem-solving, rhyming

Activities:

Draw/Count: Provide dice and drawing materials. Roll the dice. Draw one dot on your paper for each number on the die. Switch papers with a friend and join the dots to make a shape. How many sides does the shape have? How many points? Give the shape a face and a personality!

Compare/Contrast: Provide a collection of 2-D and 3-D shapes in a bag. Pull out two different shapes at a time. How are they the same? How are they different?

STEM Challenge: Provide craft sticks and playdough. What shapes can you build? Help your brain grow by trying more than one way to build a shape.

Read and Think: Read the book My Shape is Sam by Amanda Jackson & Lydia Nichols (see my review here). Which book did you like best? Why?