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In 1994 my literary agent suggested that I
consider writing math books for children because I have a degree in
mathematics and I worked for nearly twenty years as a computer
programmer. I read many of the recent children's math books and was
struck by the fact that not much was written about how scientists use
math in their work.
What I needed was a context for the math
that would be interesting to elementary school children. I thought of
the Denver Zoo. When Klondike and Snow were born in November 1994, I
got to know Cindy Bickel, a veterinary technician at the zoo. She told
me she used math all the time in her work and that she'd like to help
me. Because the zoo decided to publish their own book about the polar
bears, Cindy suggested that I write about T.J., a baby Siberian tiger
born in 1993. T.J.'s mother had died of cancer when the cub was 10
weeks old, so the baby tiger had to be hand-raised in the zoo nursery.
The tiger cub was underweight, because his
mother had been so sick, and then he refused to eat at the zoo
hospital. For many weeks, the veterinary staff used graphs to compare
T.J.'s weight to his father's weight at the same age, so that they could
see when T.J. was back on track.
I was excited when I heard T.J.'s story,
because I knew it would be great for showing kids how to use graphs. I
wanted to tackle the concept of graphing first, because my daughter had
struggled with graphs in school. While I worked on the book about T.J.,
I talked with several teachers to find out how they taught graphing. A
class of third graders looked at an early draft of the math and told me
what was hard for them to understand. Many teachers looked at later
drafts of the book to ensure that the math was at the right level for a
third- or fourth-grade student.
Six years later, after I had revised the
math at least 12 times, Tiger Math: Learning to Graph from a Baby
Tiger was finally published. The book introduces four different
kinds of graphs--picture graphs, circle graphs, bar graphs, and line
graphs--and shows how graphs can tell a story just like words can.
One librarian told me she has several copies
of Tiger Math in the school library, and they're always checked
out. Several children have told me they want to be veterinarians after
reading about T.J. One student wrote, "When I grow up, I will work in a
zoo. You can come and I will help you write a book."
My publisher was eager to have me continue
the math series after Tiger Math was selected as an NSTA-CBC
Outstanding Science Trade Book, an IRA Teacher's Choice, and won a
Colorado Book Award. Next in the series is Chimp Math: Learning
About Time from a Baby Chimpanzee which tells the story of Jiggs, a
small, scrawny chimpanzee whose mother ignored him. This book uses time
lines, time logs, clocks, and calendars to tell about Jiggs's first 16
months of life.
Time lines in the book show a century
(important dates for chimps in the twentieth century), a 24-hour day
(how often Jiggs was fed), a year (milestones during the first year of
Jiggs's life), and finally the decades of a chimp's life (they can live
more than five decades in a zoo). This book could serve as a
springboard to a study of all the great apes (chimps and gorillas in
Africa and orangutans in Indonesia), a study of Jane Goodall, who began
her work with chimps in Tanzania in 1960, or a classroom project using
time lines.
Long before I started writing math books, I
wrote fiction stories for children. Dear Whiskers was inspired
by one of my daughter's school projects. When she was in fifth grade,
the students in her class wrote letters to second-graders pretending
they were mice. In Dear Whiskers, every fourth grader is writing
letters to a second-grader in mouse persona. Jenny has trouble thinking
of much to say. When she fails to get a letter back from her pen pal,
she is angry and embarrassed. Soon she discovers the reason for her pen
pal's silence--Sameera has recently come to this country from Saudi
Arabia and she doesn't speak much English.
Dear Whiskers has been an
inspiration at several schools for letter-writing activities. Recently,
a teacher friend had her third-graders write letters to students in the
first grade. Another teacher friend has a mouse unit for her fourth
grade class. In addition to Dear Whiskers, they read Stuart
Little, A Cricket in Times Square, The School Mouse,
Martin's Mice, Abel's Island, and Ben and Me. As an
introduction to the mouse unit, students make mouse bookmarks out of
fake fur. As a science activity, they study the life cycle of a mouse.
Meow Means Mischief is a companion
book to Dear Whiskers, but this time the main character is a new
student named Rana and the class activity is journal writing. Rana is a
racially-mixed child, whose grandparents from India have just arrived
for a visit. When a scraggly kitten comes meowing at the door, Rana's
mother says they have no time to care for a new pet. But Grandpa puts in
a good word for the cat, so Mom says it can stay for a while. Rana
hopes a while will turn into forever, but the kitten keeps getting into
mischief.
Meow Means Mischief deals with the
issue of being different, an issue my own children faced, because they
are racially mixed. My husband is Indian, while my ancestors are from
Ireland and Wales. We also had a scraggly, mischievous kitten come to
our door, so all the cat incidents in the book came from our experiences
with our cat, Tigger. This book touches on Indian puppetry, food,
clothing and attitudes about animals, which could stimulate discussion
of another culture and the ways people are different, yet fundamentally
the same.
There is a global component to all four
books I have mentioned in this article: the endangered animals from Asia
and Africa, and people from Saudi Arabia and India, which further
verifies and enriches the curriculum.
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