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Although there is evidence that the use of picture books affects young children's achievement scores in mathematics, little is known about the cognitive engagement and, in particular, the mathematical thinking that is evoked when young children are read a picture book. The focus of the case study reported in this article is on the cognitive engagement that is facilitated by the picture books themselves and not on how this engagement is prompted by a reader. The book under investigation, Vijfde zijn [Being Fifth], is a picture book of high literary quality that was not written for the purpose of teaching mathematics. The story is about a doctor's waiting room and touches on backwards counting and spatial orientation only tacitly as part of the narrative. Four 5 year olds were each read the book by one of the authors without any The writing of this article was partly supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The authors are grateful to the children and their teachers for cooperating in this study. Furthermore, they would like to thank Iris Verbruggen, their colleague at the Freudenthal Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, for testing the coding. Very special thanks go to Petra Scherer, Bielefeld University, Germany, for the enlightening discussions about how to understand the children's utterances and for checking the final coding. The authors also are obliged to Lyn English and the anonymous reviewers of this article. Their critique to two earlier versions of it stimulated the improvement and report of the study considerably. The finishing touch came from Anne Teppo, who helped non-native speakers of English with making the authors' plain writings more sophisticated.

Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holder.

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