Picture Books

Book Review, and a Message about Math Messages

/ Amy / 9 Comments

Yesterday I passed by a bookstore display of The Numberlys by William Joyce and Christina Ellis,* and my children’s math radar buzzed – was this some hot new math picture book that should be on my radar? So I stopped, and I read the book, cover to cover (it’s not long). And it turns out that it’s not a math book…but the math teacher/math lover/math advocate in me had a strong negative reaction to the message about math that it nevertheless sends.

Numberlys

I hate to write a negative review of The Numberlys, because it has so many charming qualities – beautiful illustrations, a cute and quirky setting, a message about creativity and nonconformity and cooperation that doesn’t (to me) feel tired or trite. It’s cute, it’s different, it’s fun.

But my problem with the book, and I think it’s a relevant one whether or not this particular picture book has crossed your parent path, is with the subtle message it sends about numbers and, therefore, mathematics.

Here’s the plot summary, directly from Amazon:

Once upon a time there was no alphabet, only numbers…

Life was…fine. Orderly. Dull as gray paint. Very…numberly. But our five jaunty heroes weren’t willing to accept that this was all there could be. They knew there had to be more.

So they broke out hard hats and welders, hammers and glue guns, and they started knocking some numbers together. Removing a piece here. Adding a piece there. At first, it was awful. But the five kept at it, and soon it was…artful! One letter after another emerged, until there were twenty-six. Twenty-six letters—and they were beautiful. All colorful, shiny, and new. Exactly what our heroes didn’t even know they were missing.

And when the letters entered the world, something truly wondrous began to happen…Pizza! Jelly beans! Color! Books!

The message? Numbers are gray, dull, orderly but boring, and definitely not colorful and creative. That’s what letters are for!

Do you see the problem with this message? It’s a message that I doubt Joyce and Ellis intended to send, and it’s a message easily overlooked. But it’s a message gets repeated over and over to children. Math is boring. Words are fun. Math is rigid and structured and words are beautiful and creative. I am particularly attuned to these messages because I was a child bursting with imagination (like most children!) and I got the message – math had no place for me and my creativity. It wasn’t until college that the message was disrupted and I discovered I could find just as much beauty and creativity (just of a different kind) in the world of numbers.

As parents, we can help combat that message by recognizing it, and by countering it. Have you heard of the praise-to-criticism ratio? This originally comes (as far as I can tell) from a study at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, examining low- and high-functioning business teams. They found that the praise-to-criticism ratio in high functioning teams was almost 6 to 1. That is, every criticism was balanced out by six compliments. I’ve heard this idea extended to marriages, sibling relationships, and parent-child relationships as well, and I like to think (with, admittedly, no solid research to back myself up) that a similar idea might apply to math messaging: for every (subtle or not-so-subtle) negative message a child gets about mathematics, they should hear six positive messages.

And so with that in mind, here are six positive messages I’d like to send out in response to the unfortunate negative message in The Numberlys.

 

Math-terpieces: The Art of Problem Solving by Greg Tang (get your art and math fix at the same time!)

Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno

How Much is a Million? by David M. Schwartz (my husband still remembers this one from Reading Rainbow)

Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

G is for Googol: A Math Alphabet Book by David M. Schwartz

The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos by Deborah Heiligman and LeUyen Pham

 

What are some of your favorite math-positive books for kids?

 

* Apparently this book began life as an iPad app, but I am not familiar with the app, and $5.99 was more than I was willing to pay to check it out. If any of you are familiar with the app, I’d be curious to hear how it compares with the book.

Book Review: Zero by Kathryn Otoshi

/ Amy / 2 Comments

zero

It seems to me that children’s math books fall somewhere along a continuum. On one side of the continuum the books practically shout, “I am a MATH book! I will teach you something!” On the other side, the math is so subtle that you might not even notice it’s there.

I’m much more partial to the subtler side of the continuum, where the author weaves math into the fabric of the story, rather than fitting a story onto the math. It’s not that I think kids will only swallow the math if we sneak it into their literary diet. There are some fantastic, mathiest-of-math books that are engaging and fun and fantastic for children. But sometimes when the mathematics doesn’t jump out and hit you on the head there can be a lot more room for conversation. You just need to know what to look for.

One of my students recently lent me her copy of Zero, by Kathryn Otoshi. I had neither seen nor heard of this book, but I fell in love with it from the very first page. This book hits my sweet spot—simple, gorgeous illustrations; an engaging, child-friendly story; solid mathematics; and plenty of conversation fodder. It’s fantastic. I’m going to give it to myself for Christmas.

In this book, there are two big mathematical ideas:

1. Zero is a different kind of number.
I could write a whole blog post about this idea. (I probably will.) But here’s the short of it: young children don’t initially think of zero as a number because zero is not “part of the count.” When we count, we typically start with “one”. And we never ask our children to count a set of no objects. They’d probably think we were joking if we pointed at an empty tabletop and said, “Count the M&Ms!”

2. With only ten symbols, we are able to write numbers as big as we want to.
This is an under-recognized beauty of our number system. Many historical number systems (like Roman numerals) can only represent quantities up to a certain size before running out of symbols. But our modern Arabic numerals have infinite possibilities for combining just ten symbols into any number we can imagine.

So what can you do with this book (besides read it)? Talk about the math! Here are just a few ideas to get you started, but let your child lead the way and see where the conversation takes you.

  • Ask your child, “Is zero a number?” and see what they say. Probe their thinking. You can use the context of the book (but you don’t have to). Why would zero feel left out? What’s different about zero?
  • Have your child write the biggest number they can think of, and the smallest number they can think of. Together, see if you can think of bigger and bigger numbers (and for older children, smaller and smaller). It’s a game, but a game that can help your child think about how writing numbers “works.”
  • Talk about how the numbers in the book can join themselves together. What kinds of numbers could two numbers make? Four numbers?
  • And you don’t have to stop at math. Talk about friendships, fitting in, being yourself, working together.