The Little Elephants' BIG Adventures

The Little Elephants' BIG Adventures series was developed by our lab group to provide parents and teachers with research-based educational picture books that are also fun and engaging for young children. These books are designed to support young children's mathematical language skills. Mathematical language skills (terms and concepts such as more, most, a lot, same, similar, different, few, fewest) are foundational for young children's numeracy development. To develop these books, we collaborated with a professional author and professional illustrator. We recently completed a randomized control trial study with parents reading these three books to their children (4x each) over a month. We found that reading these books had a significant benefit for children's mathematical language and numeracy skills. This study was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology. If you do not have access to the article, please send me an email and I will send it to you. 

The books were also developed with built-in prompts for caregivers to use to enhance the reading experience with children. The books were written by Angela Isaacs and illustrated by Matt Dye. We are currently in the process of developing and evaluating six additional Little Elephants books.