Math & Literacy

The past few weeks I have been trying to tie in more books into my day. Math is one of the easiest places to bring in text.  I have often challenged my kids to find a book that you can't use math in...they've still never found one!  The books are short, but create a context for the kids to use when solving problems.
We are working on NBT 4.5  and NBT 4.6, these focus on multiplying and dividing.  The books I chose for various lessons were:

All three of these books lend themselves to multiplying and dividing as well as other areas of math.  

    With the first book, The Doorbell Rang, we investigated how to share cookies among different numbers of children.  This is so easy to differentiate for those that may need more of a challenge or those that need to work with simpler numbers.  Some children needed to use our beans, from Bean Thirteen math to help them split up the cookies.  These types of practice help kids to see when we would use division in our own lives.    

   If you wanted to extend the book further you could bring in a recipe for cookies and work on doubling, or halving fractional amounts.  You could work on area and perimeter as they create a table to hold all the children.  The possibilities keep going! 

    The other book we used this week was another of my favorites, Minnie's Multiplying Diner. In this book the McFay family comes to the diner and continues to order more food- doubling the amount each time.  Doubling would be great for younger kids, but we are ready to move to double digit multiplication.  So I created a menu based on the items in the story and posed questions about how much it would cost to buy combinations of certain items or 32 of everything on the menu. To make it more complex, some problems were multi-step where they calculated the total cost and then change from a given dollar amount.  

    

Lastly, yesterday we read 365 Penguins .  This book is full of math, it would be great for adding, money, measurement and many other areas.  We used it again to work on multiplication.  Using the information in the text I just constructed questions that related to multiplication and caring for penguins.  I only created one version of this activity as I was looking specifically at the strategies they are using to solve the problems.