I recently had the opportunity to get hold of a collection of children’s picture books with math stories. A fellow scienceblogger had been contacted by a publisher, who offered to send review copies of their books to interested SBers.<\/p>\n
The publisher turned out to be the folks who publish the “Sir Cumference” books. My wife bought me a copy of the first of that series as a joke, and my daughter immediately appropriated it, and absolutely loved it. So I requested copies of a large bunch of their math adventures, and I’ll be posting reviews as my daughter and I finish them.<\/p>\n
The first one that we read together is “A Place for Zero”:, by Angeline Sparagna Lopresti. My daughter picked this one because of the artwork: it’s done in a really attractive style – simple enough to be engaging, and yet complex enough to really be a part of the story.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The story takes place in the Kingdom of Digitaria, where the number zero is a sad, lonely digit. He’d been created by Count Infinity, the court wizard of the kingdom, as an experiment, and no one knew what to do with him. The story is about his search for a purpose.<\/p>\n
He first goes to visit Count Infinity – where they have a really clever little encounter where they teach the idea of zero as the additive identity. This still leaves Zero feeling incomplete, so he goes to King Multiplus, the ruler of Digitaria, to see if he can help figure out Zero’s place. And this is where the book sadly doesn’t quite pull off it’s aim.<\/p>\n
The problem is, up to this point, the story is written as if it’s aimed at first or second graders. But once they get back to King Multiplus, the whole tone of the book just stops working. It’s styled as if it’s written for a first grader – but the content is too difficult – it doesn’t explain<\/em> enough for it to really make sense. It tries to introduce the idea of 0 as the placeholder in decimal numbers, but it does it in such a rush that it seems to assume that the kids already really understand what zero does in a decimal number system. One moment, the King is talking about how they can’t do numbers larger than 9 because they run out of digits – the next moment, zero is standing next to one, and everyone understandings the idea of decimal number placement. There’s no explanation – it just pops out of nowhere. It’s quite unfortunate – the author did such a nice job finding a way of working an explanation of the idea of additive identity into the story, but she couldn’t quite pull off the same thing for number placement. <\/p>\n I really<\/em> want to love this book. There’s a lot of really great stuff about it. But unfortunately, the leveling problem is just a bit too severe. It just doesn’t explain things properly for the younger kids, who seem to be the intended audience; and the writing style and generally “cutesy” style won’t work for older kids.<\/p>\n I don’t mean to say that it’s not a good book. It’s nice – just not terrific. But the quality of the “Sir Cumference” books from this publisher really had me expecting something great. Instead, “A Place for Zero” ranges from very good in some parts to confusing in others. Overall, if I had to rate it on a 1 to 5 scale, I’d give it something like a 3: above average, but definitely not exceptional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently had the opportunity to get hold of a collection of children’s picture books with math stories. A fellow scienceblogger had been contacted by a publisher, who offered to send review copies of their books to interested SBers. The publisher turned out to be the folks who publish the “Sir Cumference” books. My wife […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-for-young-mathgeeks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-5m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}