I love when I can incorporate things into my family’s home school that are familiar to me from my own childhood. I think most adults in America today have heard the story of the three little pigs. We could all probably even recite it from memory.

I was happy to learn about this book by Grace Maccarone, called The Three Little Pigs Count to 100. It is a wonderful spin on the original story and includes math on almost every page.

It begins with one mother pig with three sons, but only two apples. She has to figure out how she will split the apples between them all. She ends up cutting each of the apples in half. This creates 4 pieces of apple: one piece for the mother and one for each of her sons.

Everyone is happy, but also still hungry. So, the mother sends the little pigs off to make their own way in life (thus earning their own apples). At this point, the story goes similarly to the one we all know and love.

One little pig makes a home of straw, one a home of sticks, and one a home of bricks. And, each time, a wolf comes to huff and puff and blow their house down!

The difference between this story and the old story is that it tells us how many bales of straw the first pig uses. It also tells us he made his straw house into the shape of a cylinder. And the little pig with the house made of sticks, put a teepee over the sticks and made a cone shape. The little pig whom made a house of bricks made his into the shape of a cube.

From the ONE mother, TWO apples, THREE little pigs, all the way to the 100 bricks the third little pig used for his house, the books helps your child count, add, learn shapes, and even ordinal numbers. Priced at $16.99, this book is perfect for beginning readers, but also good for an older sibling to read to a younger sibling. (They will learn/review math without realizing it!)

My youngest (age 7) LOVED this book! She wanted to take it to our homeschool enrichment to show all her friends. She enjoyed counting all the bales of hay and sticks the pigs used to build their houses. She didn’t really enjoy counting the 100 bricks used by the last pig, but only because it took too long and she wanted to see what happened next in the story.

I think this is a great book for young children. It has the same premise as the original story adults know and love, but adds in some wonderful new elements, too. Kids will increase their vocabulary as well as their math skills with this sweet rendition of the three little pigs.

-Product Review by Nicole Coffman-Cole, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, February, 2016