It Bears Repeating

What bears repeating? Counting bears again as It Bears Repeating is a counting book, one that involves employing the numbers from one to ten with polar bears being the thing to be counted. Each number, which is presented in its word form only, is treated in a pair of facing pages, with one page being given to Tagaq’s text and the other to Pootoogook’s illustration. As can be seen in the “Excerpt” above, Tagaq divides each page’s brief text into two parts, with the first line rendered in Inuktitut followed by its English translation. The accompanying three-line portion of the text is a word sandwich in which the first and third lines tell readers how many bears they should be looking for in Pootoogook’s art while the middle line indicates what the bears are doing. Each of the first and third lines also contains an adjective which describes the

bears while also connecting to the bears’ activities. Though not necessarily obvious on a first reading, Tagaq loosely tells the story of “a day in the life of a polar bear”.

According to a note on the copyright page, “The artwork in this book was created with colored pencil.” Pootoogook’s first and second bears repeat throughout the book as the first is coloured differently than the other nine bears while the second, likely a cub, is much smaller than the rest. I suspect that each succeeding bear may also reappear, but the subtleties in their differences make them hard to identify. Presented against an icy blue background, the bears’ images clearly stand out for counting.

The book’s closing page lists each of the Inuktitut words in the order in which they appeared in the text, followed by a phonetic guide on how to pronounce them as well as their English translation.

A quibble, but I wish the book had also included the numbers in their numeric forms as that is how most youngsters first encounter numbers, as digits, not letters. Nonetheless, It Bears Repeating is still a most worthy addition to home collections as well as libraries serving the pre and early school audience. Not only can children practice their counting, but they can also absorb some information about polar bears.