My Mothers Chair, written and illustrated by Vera B. Williams is a story about a little girl who's house burns down and her family trying to get back to normal life. Her "mothers chair burnt down along with he house in which they lived. This causes them to lose everything they had! Each day the girl goes to her mothers work at the "Blue Tile Diner" after school to help with little things like fill up the ketchup. When they get home, the little girl and her grandma count all the tips and save up the tips in a jar, hoping to one day buy a comfy chair so they can rest there feet somewhere after a long day at work.
This story shows the concept of exponential growth. It also teaches the concept of poverty, in which some people are unable to buy things like a chair. This story does a great job in showing the images in what is going on. The little girl saves up money from each day and at a certain time will achieve her goal, which is to buy a chair. This s exponential growth where you don't know the end number or the number of coins, but you do know the amount of time it takes, so it also teaches the children reading multiplication.
Childrens books are extremely influential on a child's life, for example even terrorist use books to teach children. We use books to teach children how to reach, about historical events and math. Using books to teach math is a fun and interactive way for children to learn without even realizing they are doing math! This is an effective way to teach math because it is a fun story and shows the importance of saving and also counting as well!
This is such an interesting story to choose for this assignment because it doesn't have very obvious themes of a mathematical concepts, yet you did a great job at tying the two together! Using tips and including the daily counting is such an clever way at explaining exponential growth and allowing one to grasp how to use it in a real life setting. I thought you did a good job at summarizing the story and explaining how the overall themes apply to math. I also agree with you literature is important to math, and I like that you highlighted how influential books are for children, thus it is inevitable that teaching math through books would not be helpful. Good Job!
ReplyDeleteeric,
ReplyDeleteone of my favorite stories by vera williams. nice choice! i like that you chose to talk about growth for this text. i am not sure how exponential it is, so it would have been good to show maybe an illustration of how you see the growth. you last paragraph is good and makes me think about ALL the uses of literature, not just for teaching math.
professor little