steaM - NEW MATH Picture Books Review
When I started this blog nearly a year ago, I set out to highlight excellent new children’s books, ranging from picture books to middle grade books, that had STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) or civics/geography/history elements embedded in them. You may have noticed there hasn’t been much in the way of math-focused books. Do I love math? Yes, I do. Did I actively hate math as a child? Yes, I did. It’s a shame too, because I was such a curious child and math is such a curious subject, filled with so many questions. In fact, so many accomplished mathematicians celebrate the questions and curiosities of math. Like many, my childhood exposure to math required rote memorization and often seemed to have one “best” way to solve a problem. Author Priya Narayanan wrote the picture book biography, Friend of Numbers: The Life of Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In this book, you follow the life of young Ramanujan growing up in rural India, finding patterns and numbers in everyday life. Later in life, as he was studying at Cambridge University in England, he spilled some lentil beans and started organizing the beans into varying combinations. Ramanujan truly embodied this notion that math is creative and malleable. This book is an excellent way to engage kids in conversation about the patterns we see all around, because Ramanujan saw patterns everywhere…even in his bath water!
Another recent picture book with math is, The Power of Snow by fellow Chicagoan, Bob Raczka. This is a great book for math teachers to use when teaching exponents. It shows you how snowflakes increase exponentially, taking the reader from 2 to the first power all the way to 2 to the fourteenth power. The rhyming text is a great fit for the concept and the beautiful winter illustrations with animals will engage the reader.
Heart: I didn’t truly start loving math until I taught it. We used the “traditional” mathematical approach when I taught 5th grade. After 8 years of teaching 5th grade, I moved on to teaching 7th grade social studies (the U.S. Constitution). It was during my time teaching 7th grade social studies that I took Stanford professor Jo Boaler’s online course, “How to Learn Math for Teachers.” I highly recommend that parents and teachers check out youcubed.org - Jo and her team at Stanford are not just making math more accessible, they are making it fun!
Head: I was listening to NPR the other day and caught an interview with Eugenia Chen, the author of a recent book for adults, Is Math Real?: How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths It was such an interesting interview - much of what she said made me think of Ramanujan. I am adding it to my long to-read-list!