Young children always enjoy looking at bright pictures, and with this book they can also learn to recognize, name and create different patterns. It includes everyday shapes such as wiggly toothpaste or squishy spiral cake, manufactured ones like spotted party balloons or splotches of messy paint, and natural ones such as stripes on a zebra or ripples in water. The straightforward text encourages reading skills and interactivity - see what patterns you can find on a wing of a butterfly, make zigzags in wet sand, and count the rings to find out the age of a tree. This first words and picture book will delight and inform early learners, who will love looking at it with grown-ups or by themselves. Compiled with the advice of educational specialists, this special padded boardbook combines lively, simple text with bold, bright photographs to promote the development of literacy skills. Experts agree that preschool children respond more immediately to photographs than to illustrations, and this book is full of lively images of objects, activities and people that youngsters will encounter in the world around them.The images are carefully arranged into visual and subject groups, such as spots, checks, zigzags, wiggles, swirls, spirals, natural patterns, animal patterns, and patterns that we can make ourselves - such as drizzles of icing or footprints on the ground. Young readers will see and identify with the pictures of children just like them, encouraging them to make connections, and to see how various things develop and work together.