Bat Jamboree

As an elementary teacher, I’ve utilized literature in my classroom to help kids make connections about math across the curriculum. Over the years, I’ve collected quite a few books that kids love to read while also helping to develop their ideas about numbers. Often, it’s a book that can grab a hold of a child and make math come to life for them. They suddenly realize that math is not simply numbers on a piece of paper, but pictures, objects, and patterns that you can see and touch.

Bat Jamboree, by Kathi Appelt

A Great Counting and Math Skills Building Book for Kids

A fun book to read this time of year is Bat Jamboree, by Kathi Appelt. My (almost) 3 year old son loves this book! Each page has a different number of bats on it doing something theatrical. He loves to act like the bats do in the book, and jump around the room flapping, tapping, or singing. Its predictable pattern inspires my son to guess what number of bats will be on the next page. This is great practice for his development of number sense. At the end of the book, there are 55 bats all together and he thinks that it is just so funny to watch Mommy try to count them all. When I start counting them, sometimes he cuts me off by yelling “55!” repeatedly until I stop counting. Of course, he doesn’t yet understand that the name of a number and the amount are related. And obviously, his attention span doesn’t go to up to 55 either! Maybe in a few more years.

Need suggestions for more books like this? Check out other DreamBox Learning favorites like Pumpkin Math or a Mathematical Folktale.

Tags: Bat Jamboree, childrens literature, counting games, Kathi Appelt, kids books, Math Learning, math learning book, Numeracy

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