Measuring Penny by Loreen Leedy

1.) Measuring Penny is about a young girl, Lisa, who has a homework assignment where she needs to measure something in multiple different ways.  Lisa is supposed to use your standard units, like inches, and she also has to use non-standard units, like paper clips, to find out height, width, temperature, time, etc. Lisa uses her knowledge of unit substitutes and decides to measure her dog.  Her dog's name is Penny!  Lisa finds out that Penny's nose is one inch long, Penny's tail is one dog biscuit long, and Penny's paw print is 3 centimeter's wide. And that is just the beginning! From measuring Penny, Lisa learns a lot about her dog and a lot about measuring using units.  She ends up having a wonderful time completing her homework assignment!
2.) Measuring Penny demonstrates creative ways to work with units.  Units describe what a quantity measures or counts.  The book also demonstrates another term that we learned in class which is Unit Analysis.  Unit Analysis is working with units to help solve problems.  Each time that Penny comes up with a way to measure a Penny, she is coming up with a new unit! And when she is converting, adding, or subtracting her new creative units.  She is demonstrating basic unit analysis.
3.)  I believe that literature is definitely an effective and essential way to teach mathematical concepts.  It is easier to understand math concepts through literature because it most cases, literature takes math and incorporates it into to real life (not always realistic) scenarios.  I think our brains are naturally more tailored to understand concepts from that sense rather than from a textbook with random numbers and unfamiliar components.