Teaching with Math Books: Picture Book Linky Party

After yesterday's post about favorite books to start the year, I started to get a little sad about all of the fabulous books I still hadn't talk about. Then, it was like First Grade and Fabulous could read my mind and created a Week 2: Picture Book Linky for Math Books. Yay! Here are some of my favorite math picks.

 

The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns

 

First things first...if you are looking for great picture books for teaching math, look up Marilyn Burns. She has dedicated her life to it and she is so thoughtful. Her books have personality and they really teach a math concept well while using math terminology.

 

The Greedy Triangle is one of my all time favorites. It is about this little triangle who decides that he is dissatisfied with his shape and goes to the shape shifter and asks for one more side and one more angle. Can you guess what her is going to be my friends? Oh, that's right a parallelogram. Didn't see that one coming did you? I told Marilyn likes to use math vocabulary. Any hoo... he keeps asking for sides and angles until he basically becomes a circle. Throughout the story, he runs into lots of mishaps and decides that his own shape is the best shape to be.

 

After reading the story, I love to have my kiddos act out the sides and angles the Greedy Triangle adds with gumdrops and toothpicks. I have used marshmallows in the past and let me tell you that they do not hold the shape as well.



 

Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews

I love how this story gets kiddos thinking about math all around them. In the story, the black dots create different pictures like flowers or buttons. It is a great book for teaching counting and I love to have my kids create dot pages of their own.

 

After reading the story, I usually introduce dot plates/cards and ten frames. We discuss how to subitize the numbers and add them up quickly. It's a great numeracy exercise and we do it all year.



 

 

The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle

This is one of my go to books for teaching time to the hour. The Grouchy Ladybug just cracks me up and with my next classroom theme being Eric Carle, guess who's going to be hanging out by my classroom clock. :)

 

The Grouchy Ladybug is all about a ladybug who would rather fight over something then share. She ends up spending an entire day trying to fight different animals and then deciding that they aren't "big" enough. In the end, a blue whale teaches her a lesson and she finds that sharing isn't all that bad.

 

After reading this story, I talk about time to the hour and then we go back through the story and make the different times on our clocks. I love the part with the whale because it really let's you know if kiddos have experience with quarter after, half past, and quarter 'til. It's a great preassessment.

 



Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes

 

This is a wonderful story to go with learning names at the beginning of the year. Chrysanthemum is a little mouse who loves everything about her name and then she goes to school. She is made fun of for her name being too long and a type of a flower. She starts to dread school until her fabulous music teacher reveals that she too has a long, flower name.

 

After reading this story, we always play a syllable name game and then we write, graph, and count the letters in our own names.

 

What are your favorites? Does anyone have a great book for base ten?

 

Be sure to link up with First Grade and Fabulous!