Response to an article

Article #2 

Picture Book Power:  Connecting Children’s Literature and Mathematics

By:  J. Shatzer

This was an excellent article on connecting math and literature.  It started out talking about the book “The Wolf’s Chicken Stew.”  The ironic thing was that last year, I was looking for books to read on the 100^th day of school and came across this.  At first, by looking at the title..I thought…what will this have to do with 100?  Well, I quickly found out and it made it’s point with my Pre-K students. 

When picking a book, choose a book that is going to motivate the students in the area of math as well as literature.  The article stated that children’s l iterature can be the vehicle for providing meaningful context for learning in the area of math.  How true this is!  I definitely see this as I teach Kindergarten.  The students are engaged in the book and learn the math concept.  

I also gained from the article to keep counting  books in my classroom library, which I do.  There are a wide variety of very engaging counting books to be found…some even may contain a kids favorite character. 

The most important point in this article to me was by Trelease and Rosenblatt who said that picture books are usually the first type of children’s literature that a young child encounters, so there needs to be purposeful selection of books for interactive read-alouds.  This develops reader, text, and context connections.

*This is a lesson I chose to represent this article.

Materials:  Anno’s Counting Book, unifix cubes(12 per student

For this lesson, I read Anno’s Counting Book to the students.  As, I read this books, we were able to look at the unifix cubes on the side page of the book and count them, and also count the objects on the page.  On each page, more object and unifix cubes are added.  This provides a great visual for the children. 

After the read aloud, I sent students to the tables to sit with their unifix cubes.  We now will re-read the book and as we read each page, we will begin to stack the unifix cubes to match the number on the page.  As we do this, we will count the unifix cubes and also look at what the number word looks like. 

To extend this activity to involve text to self, I sent a note asking the students to bring in a certain number of items from 0-15.  The students bring these in the next day, and we will do a one to one counting activity with them.