James Young (1) (1956–)

I came across A Million Chameleons by chance but was taken with the entertaining way it introduces color identification to young children. The flock of Chameleons journeys together to the zoo, a merry go round and even the skating rink, all the while changing color on each page, which allows for the fun experience of participatory guessing. Young’s illustrations and rhyming narration are both playful and exciting enough for many repeated reads.

When teaching early childhood art lessons, I show more love to emphasize that there are many different shades of each color and this book does a great job of showing a range of blues, reds and pinks. I also love that it makes the process of learning color easy and fun as the characters are lively and dancing all over the pages while the child gets to guess what color they will change next. It even concludes by introducing the idea of multicolored as the million chameleons change every color hue at the same time! Additionally, this book provides a great example of the wondrous range of colors found in our natural world, sometimes even in one magical creature such as the chameleon. show less

It starts out much like The Cat in the Hat: brother and sister stuck inside on a rainy day with nothing to do - so they go up into the attic and look into Uncle Ned's trunk, which contains only a scrap of paper. It's not a treasure map, but a recipe for alligator cookies. A real alligator dissuades them by presenting another recipe instead (peanut butter and cornflakes, mostly). Rhyming text ("And when you make them, you don't have to beat them. You don't have to bake them. You just have to show more eat them").

This is one I remembered from my childhood and hunted down to share with the toddler. She likes it a lot too! show less

Awfully simple and cartoony, but I bet little children love it. Would make a good board book, because it will get a lot of handling.

This book is an easy counting book. The setting is winter time with lots of snow. There are few colors because of the snow. The book starts off with one puppy and builds to finding ten. There are other animals that see the puppies. The author has rhyming text to make the counting flow with the story. In the end all ten puppies get cold and find their mother.
I thought this was a cute book. I love books with animals and this book had several. I also like books that rhyme.
In a classroom, one show more could do a few different lessons with this book. I would probably give a counting lesson with it and then have the students draw pictures of things they could count. The could count them on their own or exchange with a friend. show less