1. I read the book titled The Grapes of Math by Greg Tang. I chose this children's book because the titled intrigued me, as I noticed it was a play of the critically acclaimed novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Unlike the original novel, The Grapes of Math is a cheerful book, depicting colorful images of several different things that are to be counted by young readers. The book aims to provide a fun reading experience, while teaching how one can count most efficiently by using such methods as grouping, multiplication, addition, and subtraction, to speed up the process, rather than counting each item or picture individually.
2. Each page of the book contains an image with a certain number of items, along with a short text that rhymes. The text has to do with the image, and provides a suggestion for how the items should or should not be counted. For example, the second page shows an image of two different kinds of grape bunches: 4 green bunches with 3 grapes each, and 4 purple bunches with 7 grapes each. The text reads: "How many grapes are on the vine? Counting each takes too much time." Here the text suggests the simply counting the grapes one by one would be too labor intensive. Instead, the next line reads: "Never fear, I have a hunch. There is a match for every bunch." The text is implying that the reader should count the grape bunches that have the same number of grapes, multiply the number of grapes on each bunch but the total number of bunches, and then finally add them together. So for example, one should count that there are 4 bunches of 7 of grapes, and 4 bunches of 3 grapes, so one would multiply 4X7 and add that result to the product of 4X3, giving us a total of 40 grapes (28+12). Using other items such as watermelon seeds, ants, camels, and more, the author give clever hints of which operation should be used to facilitate the counting.
3. Books can be an incredibly fun way of learning math, especially for children, because it is much less intimidating. Instead being presented as a difficult task, a book with colorful illustrations introduces math as a entertaining activity. This can allow children to pick up essential mathematical skills and concepts without realizing they are doing math problems. This can significantly reduce the fear and anxiety many children have toward math. In addition, the math concepts used in children's books are simple enough that they do not require complex explanations, but rather can be explained through by clever means, such as rhyme.
I too was startled by the title of this book, and it caught me off guard and intrigued. Multiplication is a fun time, especially when you can rhyme. It is funny how such a simple thing like rhyming can make something like math so much easier to learn.
ReplyDeletemax,
ReplyDeletegreg tang is one of my favorite authors of children's books for math. and you are right, the title is catchy! nice synopsis of the story and good discussion of how literature is an effective teaching tool. you do a good job of explaining the concepts from the story in detail, but it would have been good to show how some of these topics can be related to concepts from our own class, like how the examples relate to symmetry.
all in all a good post. (points deducted for being late, though)
professor little