I have mixed feelings about what we accomplished academically on the first day, and I feel like it needs more/better/different work. Here are the books:
Starting the day as a group we read:
365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet
Large format and silly story made it perfect for reading aloud to a group. A family gets one penguin a day in the mail and has to think of ways to store them, how much it costs to feed them, and how to live with them. The math is so funny that you almost don't notice it, and I object to the global warming bit at the end only because it seems heavy handed in such a lighthearted book.
Anno's Math Games by Mitsumasa Anno
This one I orginally found at MacBeth's Opinion. It teaches math concepts without numbers.
We read from page 70 on about how to compare things of different sizes. Then using a bunch of plastic balls, the kids took turns throwing them into a box and coloring in bar graphs. This was intended for the 1st grade and under crowd.
One Grain of Rice by Demi
An Indian girl cleverly tricks a selfish raja into giving his starving people rice by asking for one grain of rice and then doubling what she has already gotten each day for 30 days. Poor Raja's math skills are lacking. If only he knew that she would have (2 to the x power) - 1 grains of rice at the end of the month--where x equals the day--he would have figured out that this was a bad bargain for him. It's a happy ending; everyone has enough to eat and the raja is reformed.
With just my kids we talked through this book. The 1st and under crowd were allowed to count dimes and put them into a big bowl, each dime representing one grain of rice. The 2nd grade and older crowd used long division to find out how many rolls of dimes and loose dimes to put in the bowl. Then when our dimes are exhausted (you would need over a billion), we looked at a mostly blank chart of how many grains the Indian girl got each day. I taught the kids lattice multiplication which was simple when we were only multiplying by 2. Even the 2nd grader tried although she isn't doing multiplication yet.
Once the kids are calculus level, we could revisit the book to discuss the forumlae for how many grains of rice the clever girl gets each day and how many she gets total. For now, we just read and enjoy the sumptuous pictures.
Mathterpieces by Greg Tang This is my favorite of his books so far. This book stresses finding different groups of numbers which add up to the same final answer, ie 5+5 and 6+4 both equal 10. We used different colored legos to represent the groups so the kids could manipulate them. Then we practiced counting and saying the entire math sentence that they created. Part of what I love, though, is the tie in with famous works of art. It's so easy to rabbit trail from there.
Math Chef--This book inspired me to make a special fraction problem pancake recipe, but we didn't have time to do it the other day. Maybe next time. It's all saved in a special Mardi Gras Math file.
Archimedes and the Door of Science--I was going to use this book to add in a little history in when we talked about circles. The math in this book was so interesting that the kids and I fought to tell my husband about it.
