Wumbers Paperback – March 3, 2015

My students (6, 7, and 8 graders) loved using this book to write different cards for the teachers at school.

This book is an easy compliment to the idea introduced in the "CDB" books. It is fun for kids to see and understand as they are often familiar with the use of Wumbers in their text messages. Bright colors and fun storyline makes it very enjoyable to read.

This is a clever book. I loved it and gave it to my grandchildren.

This book is a blast. Not only are the kids learning that you can insert numbers into works but it is kind of fun to watch them struggle with the words. They get so excited when they get the words right.It is also a great learning tool.

Gave this as a gift. Smart. Cute.

This is a great brain teaser for kids and adults. I teach elementary school and the kiddos just LOVE this book and love cre8ting their own! Also check out William Steig's C D B! and C D C?

Wumbers is almost a really great children's book. The concept of replacing part or all of a word with a number is a fun one. It helps kids reflect on what letters and numbers do in a playful way. And for my pre-readers, it helped them "sound out" some simple words like "4t", since they can "read" a number easier than they can "read" a collection of letters, so it has great potential as an aid to literacy. But in its execution, I thought Wumbers falls short, primarily because it has no story. Each spread is a disconnected scene in which various characters (the cast of characters changes throughout the book as well) have a brief conversation. These episodes have no connection to one another, so it is really like reading a series of independent comic strips, not a continuous story. I enjoyed the illustrations, which are fun and colorful, and some of the episodes are fun or humerous. But my main feeling was one of disappointment at what could have been. I loved E-mergency!, a spectacular book about the role of letters couched in a fun and clever story about an injury to the letter E. And with the same illustrator doing the images in this one, I was excited to give it a try. But it just didn't measure up. It's still a decent book, and I like the concept, but it cries out for a story.

My seven year old daughter recently read Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld's book, Wumbers. She really dug the challenge of figuring out the various mind-teasers of the word/number combinations and after quickly reading through the book two or three times over a couple days, had figured out all but two on her own. However, once she had all of them figured out and thus the challenge of the book was over, her interest in re-reading the book vanished and this is my real criticism with the book.Although cleverly written and loaded with beautiful pictures, the book requires somewhat advanced young readers to not only read the whole sentence, but also to divine the meaning of the number/word combos. Because of this, the book is really designed for 9-12 year old readers - an age group that is largely already into longer, more complex chapter books - thus Wumbers is probably a book that these kids would see as lacking in content. On the flip side, I think that early readers would be completely at a loss in how to read this book. Their reading and cognitive skills are just not advanced enough for Wumbers. Similarly, reading aloud to your children or a classroom removes the whole cachet of the book as the parent/teacher simply reads aloud the text and any thought of the number/word combos simply goes over the head of the listener or is completely ignored.I think the book is a really clever idea which piggybacks on the style of the day of including word/number combos to simplify key strokes when texting. However, the application of this phenomena into a children's book leaves the young reader either mystified or quickly bored.