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Sunday, November 15, 2015

The grapes of math


1. I chose to read the grapes of math by Greg Tang and illustrated by Harry Brigs. The book is filled with different simple math problems to teach children basic concepts for their future math careers. The book is filled with cute colorful pictures to keep you intrigued the whole time, and uses riddles to format the problems to make it a little bit more fun for the kids. The book doesn’t necessarily have a synopsis, as every riddle has it’s own story, rather than all following one plot.  The book uses creative riddles with cute illustrations like snails or shells and teaches kids short cuts to make solving math problems more efficient.


2. The most prevalent concept in this story is the counting principle. The book illustrates different counting techniques and using units. The different counting techniques are given in the instructions of each riddle. For example, “the  snail parade” teaches kids that rather than counting individually each snail, they can calculate the amount of snails that should be in the given area and then subtract how many are missing. The same concept is also shown in the “Large pizza to go!” riddle. It provides the idea that rather than counting each individual mushroom on the pizza, you can count half of the pizza and then multiply by two.



The book also teaches units by providing a different item to be counted for each riddle. By doing this it gets children in the habit of writing what unit they are counting. By jumping from snails to mushrooms, to dots on dice, they realize that writing the units of what is being calculated is important to showing the proper answer and beneficial to communicating in the math world.


3. Literature is an effect way to teach math because using words to explain numbers is more beneficial to some students, especially when explaining why we use the concepts that we do in math, and to explain the process of solving equations. Without using literature, people essentially wouldn’t be able to learn math. You need to use words to explain numbers, especially to young children.

6 comments:

  1. Its cool that every illustration had its different story, I thing your right, this is a great book for kids to learn, I would add, especially those with learning differences, or a very visual way of learning.

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    1. agreed, mike! it's great for various learning styles!

      professor little

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  2. I thought the book layout was very cool and defiantly got the point and subject across.

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  3. I also read this book and I agree that it uses riddles and illustrations in order to teach children

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  4. I really like the pictures, they really add to the post!

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  5. mary,

    good post! one of my favorite children's books for math. i really like your last paragraph explaining the effectiveness of literature in mathematics. =]

    professor little

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