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Tuesday Teacher Tip: Books That Teach Math

Lisa W — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:01:33 +0000

Welcome to the Tuesday Teacher Tips series! Each week we’ll highlight teaching and learning resources, ideas to use in the classroom, as well as things to ponder as you go about your teaching day. Multiplication and division may be the most anticipated math topics of third grade; this is what the big kids study. But as much as third graders look forward to learning about multiplication and division, they’re topics that produce worry and anxiety. This is the “hard math” they’ve been hearing about from their older siblings. There are two books I love to use during these units of study, One Hundred Hungry Ants and A Remainder of One, both by Elinor J. Pinczes. These books show the fun side of math. Soon students are realizing that multiplication and division aren’t that big of a deal. In fact, they’re kinda easy! One Hundred Hungry Ants is a great introduction to arrays and factor pairs. As the ants march their way to the picnic, the littlest ant desperately tries to get there faster by rearranging the group from one row of 100 to two rows of 50 to four rows of 25, and so on as they go. When you’re done reading, have the students draw pictures or arrays of the different ways that the 100 ants arranged themselves. Label each picture with the multiplication equation. Poor Joe in A Remainder of One! In order not to be the misfit or oddball he must figure out a way to divide 25 into even groups without any remainders. This is a great book for students to participate with as they listen. Give each student 25 counters. As Joe figures out a new way to assemble the troop, allow students to move the counters and see if it divides out evenly. Then continue reading the book for the next dividing adventure!

Share your favorites

What are your favorite books that teach math? I’d love to hear from you! Do you have an idea for a future Tuesday Teacher Tips topic you’d like to see covered? Let me know and it could be featured in a future blog.

Thankful for Math?

Beth — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:53:56 +0000

Thanksgiving Wish, by Michael J. Rosen

It is always nice to have a fresh perspective on old traditions, but math on a holiday? Many kids will groan if their parents suggest such a thing. There is a way to make the connection between Thanksgiving and math, but it’s always nice to start off this lesson with a story. Thanksgiving is a time of year when teachers traditionally review the great harvest, discuss the Native American and pilgrim lifestyle, and help students find time to give thanks about something in their lives. It can be hard for kids to make the connection about people from hundreds of years ago, even if there is a common thread of giving thanks. In Thanksgiving Wish, author Michael J. Rosen writes about a non-traditional Thanksgiving in modern times. A power outage, a missed grandmother, as well as Jewish and Asian traditions line the edges of this touching story. So where’s the math? Well, Thanksgiving is the most gluttonous day of the year and in order to create such wonderful food, the chef must know how to calculate. Cooking is a fantastic link between math and real life, even on a holiday!

Here are some fun turkey math activities for your Thanksgiving day:

Review elapsed time by helping your child write down the times that the turkey went into the oven and the time it came out. Your child might need a little help calculating the number of hours if it crosses a 12.
Let your child measure a set of ingredients. Try letting the little ones do the dry ingredients, while the older chefs might be able to handle the liquids without too many spills.
Simply counting out forks, knives and spoons can be helpful practice for many early learners.
Fractions are almost always used in cooking and can be tricky to double for a large group of people.

After tasting Aunt Kari’s pumpkin pie the year she put in too much salt, I’d say I’m very thankful for math, especially on a holiday! This story illustrates the blending of international traditions with a US holiday and reminds us how giving thanks is a universal language just like math. Celebrate the Thanksgiving of math with World Math Day on March 4th!

How a Thanksgiving Visit Can Teach 1-to-1 Correspondence

Beth — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:08:27 +0000

Grandma and Grandpa were coming for a visit, so I revisited my mini-library of favorite classroom books to read with my young son. He was very excited about the visit, especially after reading The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant.

He was particularly interested in where Grandma and Grandpa would sleep. Together we identified all of the beds in the house. Then we counted the number of people that would be here, including our 2 guests. Finally, we matched each person to a bed. This one-to-one correspondence practice is the foundation for basic counting.

A Great Real Life Example of Learning How to Count

I enjoy reading this book with my students around Thanksgiving, as many families have a reunion of some kind. The vocabulary is spectacular and the author’s voice is particularly realistic to kids. At one point, the narrator comments on the noise level of all of the breathing happening with all of those relatives in the house. It is also fun to see if they can identify and keep track of places for differing numbers of people to sleep in their home. Where would they put 20 relatives safely? Imagine all that breathing going on!

Bat Jamboree

Beth — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:38:31 +0000

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.

I Dream of Peace: The Children Know

Lorenzo — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:11:57 +0000

A beautiful quote that inspired me:

The children know. They have always known. But we choose to think otherwise: it hurts to know the children know. If we obfuscate, they will not see. Thus we conspire to keep them from knowing and seeing. And if we insist, then the children, to please us, will make believe they do not know, they do not see. They are remarkable--patient, loving, and all-forgiving. It is a sad comedy: the children knowing and pretending they don't know to protect us from knowing they know.

-- Maurice Sendak, preface to I Dream of Peace (UNICEF, HarperCollins l994)

Pumpkin Math

Beth — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:54:35 +0000

It’s almost Fall and pumpkin season is coming alive. I’ve seen signs for corn mazes, harvest festivals, and of course, Halloween candy out in the shelves at the store. I love this time of year! One thing I love to do in my classroom is explore the anatomy of pumpkins with my students. Even though it is goopy and requires a bit of clean up, kids love to dissect things. And if they’re excited to do work in class, they’re more likely to learn. I typically start the lesson by reading the book titled How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?, by Margaret McNamara.

Pumpkin math games and other fall activities

Here are some other fun ways to combine math and the pumpkin season.

Pumpkin math, literally

Get the book "How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin" by Margaret Mcnamara and follow along.
Find out if a pumpkin floats and why, or why not. What about a really large pumpkin? You'd be surprised.
Wrap a string around a pumpkin and guess the size. For extra credit figure out the diameter (hint: 3.14 x diameter = circumference).
Follow some of the fun fall activities at Math Cats.

Share your ideas for pumpkin math games and fall activities by posting your comments below.

How many seeds in a pumpkin?, by Margaret McNamara

How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?

This book shows how one class predicted and counted the number of seeds inside different sized pumpkins. They found that size didn’t necessarily determine the number of seeds inside. Time on the vine, number of ribs, and color all play a role in the number of seeds inside a pumpkin. Finally, they’re ready to explore the insides of a pumpkin, count the seeds, and see if their predictions are accurate. By using the counting techniques shared in the story, the students begin to explore which techniques for counting are efficient. In the story, as well as in class, the students begin to recognize that counting by 4’s is not as efficient as counting by 10’s when dealing with large numbers. It can also be fun to chart the number of ribs, color, and the number of seeds for all the pumpkins in the class to see if a pattern arises. Looking at data that was self-created is more likely to give kids have those ‘aha’ moments. It is an excellent way to help them realize that math and nature are closely linked! If you like these pumpkin math problems, check out our 2009 Pumpkin Math Activities Calendar.

Healthy Choices for Food…and Screen Time

Sarah — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:00:48 +0000

Just as parents need to make sure their children eat a mix of healthy foods - with reasonable limits on junk food and sweets - we need to have the same mindset about what our children watch. That’s the message of a recent New York Times article: Limiting, and Watching, What Children Watch, by Lisa Guernsey, and I couldn’t agree more! Most, if not all, of the parents I know have implemented a “screen time” limit for their kids, where screen time includes watching TV or movies, and playing games on the computer or handhelds. Most parents also want to make sure these screen time choices are age-appropriate, but find it difficult to really know which TV shows or movies are “healthy” and which are “junk food”.

Knowing What Games and Programs are Healthy Screen Time for Kids

Lisa’s book Into the Minds of Babes was an eye-opener to me about the available research on what makes a TV show or a computer game healthy or not, and what children can learn from them. I recommend to it all parents. It influenced how I choose what my two young sons are watching and doing at home. Her point of view has been influential here at DreamBox Learning too. For example, learning about the the intensive testing that Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues have done to understand how their shows impact kids has led us to do even more testing of our product. Our goals are very much in the spirit Lisa describes - to make our product “healthy” screen time, helping kids learn real math and have fun doing it, so that parents will offer it to their children on a regular basis without viewing it as “junk food for the brain.”

A Mathematical Folktale: More Than Just a Bedtime Story

Tami — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:26:18 +0000

A few years ago, on a much-enjoyed trip down to Portland, Oregon, I visited Powell's Books. This store used to be known as "the world's largest bookstore." I don't know what happened to that slogan, but with 7 huge stores in Portland -- 2 of which are specialty stores, and a large online service, I still believe it!!! Anyway… whenever I visit Powell's, I tend to spend the better part of a day getting lost in the children's book section. It's massive. It's impressive. It can even be overwhelming. And it’s this girth that can lead me to books I've never heard of before.

One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale

On this particular trip, I happened upon a very fine book, One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale by Demi. The story is of a Raja who believed himself to be wise and fair, but became selfish when a famine came. He refused to share his stores of the village rice. When the Raja offered a village girl a reward for a good deed, she suggested one grain of rice, doubled every day for thirty days. The Raja believed the reward to be modest and agreed to the terms. On the first day, the girl was given one grain of rice. On the second, two grains. The next day, she received four grains of rice. A few days later, she received over a thousand grains. By the end of the 30 days, the girl had received a total of one billion grains of rice -- enough for the whole village, and for the Raja too! The last page of the book has a chart to show how many grains the girl received on each day.

Math Learning Fun Through Literature

I love having this book in my collection. I really enjoy the math and moral messages. However, I also savor its fine storytelling, clever female protagonist, educationally-designed layouts, and beautiful artwork. Each page is drawn in the style of traditional Indian art, many touched with gold. And a few that open out into multi-page scenes filled with animals. By the way, One Grain of Rice, along with other great books, was mentioned in the August DreamBox Learning Parent Newsletter. The article was about children’s literature which encourages mathematical ideas. The DreamBox newsletter goes out once a month. It gives interesting and useful information to people who care about math learning. Sign up here for the Dreambox newsletter.