TPS: One Duck Stuck

One of Parker's favorite books when he was 2 or so was One Duck Stuck. So I got it out of the library today for the girls. It's about a duck that gets stuck in the muck and all his swampy friends (snakes, crickets, frogs) try to help him out. It's a counting books, so it starts with 1 duck, 2 frogs, 3 whatever, etc. None of them can get him out, but then at the end they all work together to free him from the muck.

We read it at bedtime tonight but to keep it interesting for Parker, at the end I asked him, "So Parker, if all the animals helped him out, how many animals was that?"

Without pausing to do the first set of addition, he says, "Well, 55 plus 9 is 64 so 64 animals." I turned to Michael and said, "Is that right?" not being willing to add up 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10, but thinking it didn't sound right. I started to tell Parker he was wrong because there was only 1 duck and 1+2+3+...+10 equaled 55, but then he showed me the last page which shows all the animals helping him in a sort of montage of shots across the page and the duck is in each one. Parker assumed that they were different ducks (rather than the same duck in each frame) and added them all in as 9 (since there were only 9 other animals and hence 9 other duck pictured.) Got all that?

In any case, Parker was right, according to his view, so we went on to the next book where there was no counting, just silly George and Martha.