Maths box: My cat likes to hide in boxes

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A quick trawl through your book corner will reveal a variety of stories that stimulate the development of counting and number skills, but stories to enhance the teaching and learning of shape and space are much harder to find. My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes by Eve Sutton and Lynley Dodd (Puffin Books, ISBN 0-140-0242-4) is not an obvious one at first glance.

I had been familiar with the story for a while before I saw its potential. The language used is amusing, rhyming and cumulative, with a repeated phrase on each page. The writer describes the habits of cats from different countries with those of her own cat: ‘The cat from Norway got stuck in the doorway, the cat from Spain flew an aeroplane, the cat from France likes to sing and dance… but my cat likes to hide in boxes’. The cat hidesin a range of boxes, from a wooden crate to a large hatbox.