Skip to main content

Five Faves: Stories about Math

By

 Are you looking for fun ways to build an interest in math without having to look through boring informational books? Try one of these stories about math:

Friends Beyond Measure
By Lalena Fisher
New York: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2023. Picture Book.

If you are looking for a fun, easy way to talk about graphs with your kids, this is my new favorite book on the subject. Each page has a different tool used to measure, from time lines, to bar graphs, to Venn diagrams. Homeschoolers could make a week's worth of lessons from the content on its pages. And to boot, it's a sweet story about the love friends have with each other and the difficulty when a friend moves away.

Again, Essie?
Written by Jenny Lacika
Illustrated by Teresa Martinez
Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing, 2022. Picture Book.

In this story, Rafael needs to protect his toys from his younger sister. So while she's taking a nap, he decides to build a barrier between her and his room. He gathers objects from all over his house to build the barricade. It teaches kids about spatial reasoning as he has to flip and turn items to get them to fit. If your kids enjoy this book, it's part of a whole series of storytelling math books that include concepts like patterns, counting, and problem solving.

The Bark Park
Written by Lori Haskins Houran
Illustrated by John Joven
New York: Kane Press, 2022. Easy Reader. 32 pages.

This story mixes community service and math together for a fun adventure. When Lila and her friends notice that elderly Mr. Romero doesn't have anywhere to sit at the park, they decide to wash dogs in an effort to raise money for a bench to put in the park. Along the way they learn not only about helping others, but also about percentages.

Talia's Codebook for Mathletes
By Marissa Moss
Somerville, MA: Walker Books, 2023. Fiction. 224 pages.

If you like your math with a heavy side of puzzle solving and code breaking, this book is for you. Talia has high hopes for middle school until her best friend, Dash, decides that he can't be seen spending all of his free time with a girl. At least she still gets to see him at mathlete practice, even if that does mean that she has to put up with a mean team captain. That is, until she decides to create her own, all-girl, mathlete team to compete against the boys. This book has a graphic format similar to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. So if you like your chapter books with pictures interspersed, this is a great choice for you.

Grasping Mysteries
By Jeannine Atkins
New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2020. Fiction. 305 pages.

This book is a good mix of fiction and nonfiction, telling stories about real women who loved math. It's written in verse and split into sections about different women including Florence Nightingale and Katherine Johnson, so it can easily be skimmed as well as used to learn about specific people. For those who want to encourage girls to participate in STEM fields, or learn about the real women in these fields, this is a great choice.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more