Blog #3

1 I read through the Grapes of Math by Greg Tang because I don't know were to find any books about math and this one was recommended. This books uses photos and clever poems to teach how to count quickly using groups and observing symmetries. It has a variety of examples like counting rows of ants, humps on camels, or clusters of grapes. The purpose is to show that counting something one by one is tedious, while grouping things together and counting in multiples is a much faster way of counting
2 Lets take the camel poem for example, some camels have 2 humps while others have one. Counting them one by one would take longer so we can group them into collections of 5 humps. We find 2 camels that have two humps, and group them with 1 camel with one hump. We can quickly see that there are 5 of these groups of camels and can come to the conclusion that there are 25 humps.
3 This is a creative way to teach this grouping concept because it pairs visual with clever poems. The poems instruct on a certain way to group, while the pictures are fun and colorful and can capture the imagination of a child who needs to learn this concept.