Books We Love

It is what you might call informational text, but it’s very intriguing, allowing students to compare the sizes of real animals.

For example, did your students know that an atlas moth has a wingspan of 12 inches (or 30 cm) and a dwarf goby fish, the smallest of all fish, is just \(\frac{1}{3}\) inch (or less than 1 cm) long?

Did they know that a giant squid’s eye is 12 inches across? How does that compare to the human eye?

A great picture of the head and part of the body of an Alaskan brown bear gives students a good idea of how big this 13-foot-tall (or 4 m) bear actually is.

Students might cut a string as long as the giant anteater’s two-foot-long (or 60 cm) tongue to compare it to their own tongue.

They might compare their own teeth sizes to the size of the teeth of the saltwater crocodile or the great white shark, shown actual size, in the book.

Besides the fantastic illustrations, there is information provided about lots of animals that I am sure will be of interest to students and could become the source for many interesting problems for students to create and solve. For example, if the African elephant is 13 feet tall, is that taller than your school? What else is that height?

In this issue, we are featuring the book Scaredy Squirrel goes camping, written and illustrated by Mélanie Watt and published by Kids Can Press.

This is a story kids love. The story has nothing to do with math but has potential for a teacher interested in “mathematizing” the story. I thought this might be a good example of how to take advantage in math class of books your students happen to really love.

The story is about Scaredy Squirrel’s worry about the perils of camping outside, so he decides to watch a show about camping on his new TV indoors instead of actually going camping. The only problem is that he needs to find an outlet to plug in the TV, and that involves going out in the woods.

He has a number of survival supplies (including silly things like instant oatmeal should he run into the Three Bears, popsicles should he run into penguins, a netted hat for protection from mosquitoes, etc.). Needless to say, after a lot of interesting twists and turns, the squirrel actually learns to really enjoy the outdoors.

You might be wondering where the math potential is. Here are some possibilities:

• There are a few instances where time might be addressed. For example, there is a TV schedule that talks about p.m. times. Teachers might address what p.m. times really are. There is also an interesting schedule that goes from 0530 hours to 0559 hours as Scaredy Squirrel gets ready for the TV camping extravaganza. This might lead to a discussion of digital times and how they are written, for example, using 05 instead of 5, and the notion of 60 minutes in an hour, so 0559 comes right before 6 p.m.
• There is a short section on a “boot camp,” in fact, the rubber boot camp. A warm-up routine must be repeated 143 times. It would be interesting to figure out how long that might take.
• There are a number of paths the squirrel travels, among them a training obstacle course practice run, a mini-putt course, and pulling his electrical cord on a winding path toward the outlet. These paths might set up the idea of creating various courses of different lengths, measuring distances around the school, and perhaps timing how long it takes to walk those paths.
• The illustrations are, of course, very inviting, but students might focus on how many words there are in the book and how typical that number is for books for 6-to-8-year-olds.

Although there are some amazing books that are written particularly for the purpose of bringing out mathematics concepts, and we’ll write about more of them in the future, I hope you see that many books could broaden a child’s mathematical world.