Math Read-Alouds
Carol wrote recently about String, Straight-Edge, and Shadow: The Story of Geometry and the idea of a story about a mathematical concept seemed like a great idea. We’re mostly book geeks around here, not “mathemagicians.” So I set to searching for some books aimed at my younger daughter, and found several appealing picture books.
A Remainder of One is about a troop of marching ants who keep dividing into columns that leave one ant out. Finally he has a brilliant mathematical revelation, and the 25 ants divide into 5 columns of 5. Voila! It’s a cute book written in rhyme, and it introduces the subject of division with and without remainders.
How will they get to the food the fastest? One line takes forever. Two lines isn’t much better. Not till the littlest ant figures out that ten lines moves the whole group quickly do they really start to make time. This is also written in rhyme and created by the same author-illustrator team.
Amanda Bean counts everything, and she won’t be persuaded that multiplication is faster — not until she has a dream that taxes her counting skills to the limit by giving her too much to count and too little time to count it. Both girls enjoyed this whacky tale.
This book might work well if you’re doing factorials in math. We weren’t, so Older Daughter, reading it in the back seat on the way home from the library, informed me that it started out as an interesting story and then turned into math. After I read it myself, I decided not to try it with Younger Daughter, but I may read it with Older Daughter again. It starts out developing the idea quite concretely, then becomes a little more abstract.
I had no idea there were so many such books out there; these are just the ones I could get through our library system. They provide some examples and ways of talking about math in a more entertaining format than our math text.
You can click on the button to see what others are reading this week at Read Aloud Thursday, hosted at Hope Is the Word.
9 Comments
Carol in Oregon
Thank you for the link, Janet! I just finished another book on the history of the metric system and thoroughly enjoyed it.
“it started out as an interesting story and then turned into math” – that’s a knee-slapper! :)
Carol in Oregon
Jerry Pallotta has some very basic counting books. Search for two terms: hershey math. Bringing chocolate into math class might be a win!
Janet
Thanks! Chocolate makes everything better. :-)
Alice@Supratentorial
We like the Stuart Murphy books. They are more obviously math than story but for the preschool set a fun way to introduce concepts like shape, number order, size, etc. Another more advanced one I like is If Dogs Were Dinosaurs which is a really interesting look at relative size. It’s funny enough thought that my boys like it without really getting the math concept at all.
Carol in Oregon
Janet, this is off-topic, but have you seen this?
http://www.thehighcalling.org/culture/book-review-what-use-poetry-really
Janet
No, I hadn’t. Thanks so much! What a thought provoking review!
Amy @ Hope Is the Word
Well, snort. I had typed a long comment on my iPod while I was rocking the DLM, and I lost it. :-( I think it went something like this–
We have a huge stack of math-related picture books, none of which I’ve reviewed (that I remember, anyway). I hope to review a couple picture books about graphs and measuring soon, though. We have the two ant books you review here, but we haven’t read the other two. We’ve read some of Anno’s other titles, and I really think it takes a deliberate, careful reading to really “get” the math part. I like them, though.
I’m so glad you played this week! :-)
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Janet
Why is it always our long comments that get lost that way? :-)
I’m looking forward to your math post!