Hungry For Math: Poems to Munch On by K.-L. Winters & L. Sherritt-Fleming

Abstract

Winters, Kari-Lynn and Lori Sherritt-Fleming.  Hungry For Math: Poems to Munch On,  illustrated by Peggy Collins. Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2015.

Winters and Sherritt-Fleming seemingly intend this picture book to introduce those mathematical skills and concepts that children learn in their first years of schooling: shape recognition, counting, telling time, and using money.  The authors append a glossary that defines such terms as “Base Ten,” “Ordinal numbers,” and “Rhombus.”  Having raised our expectations that this will be a mathematically informative book, they get off to a bad start in a rhyme entitled “The Balanced Bee.”

            “Three circles, tall not wide,”

Now, surely, if we are going to define a rhombus for the picture book crowd, we can also allow that a circle is a closed curve with all points on that curve equidistant from the centre. (In other words, it cannot be “tall not wide.”) 

Their presentation of the concept of time uses a variation on an old standby: “Hickory, Dickory Dock” in “Move Around the Clock.”  At one time, the original rhyme was relevant to children because it referenced the nature of a clock.  Sometimes, that clock had a pendulum or a sweep second hand to mark the passing seconds; always, it had hands that pointed to the minutes and the hours.  Not all clocks chimed, but one could at least see the hands “strike” the hours.  Most importantly, the numbers one to twelve circled the clock face and, thus, provided a visual clue to their sequence.  Children learned of this sequence without being particularly aware of their learning.

For today’s young child the typical “clock” is a digital strip on a microwave, or a smart phone, or an adult’s wrist strap. The numbers on it change either second by second or minute by minute.  Staring at this strip which might, for example, read “1:30 p.m.”, how does a child know that “1:00 p.m.” arrived a half hour earlier, that “2:00 p.m.” will arrive a half hour hence, and that “12:30 a.m.” will arrive in a further eleven hours?  The concept is no longer visually obvious.  This book does not illuminate it.

Despite a text which reads, “The mouse ran up the clock,” the mouse in Peggy Collins’ illustration does not run “up” anything: it hops along insouciantly through the gears and springs and winding key of a technology now unknown to children.  Nor does the mouse progress systematically through the hours. The text accompanying its romp reads, “…three o’clock, four-thirty, seven o’clock…nine-thirty” …etc. Primary school teacherswould have to struggle to relate anything in this story sequence to the daily rotation of the earth, and humankind’s decision to mark its course in hours, minutes and seconds.  

Equally unhelpful is the rhymed story of the Spendosaur who wastes all his pennies at the candy store.  The penny was discontinued in Canada two years before the publication of this book.  The coin’s time honoured usefulness as a counting device or an introduction to base ten is kaput.  Increasingly, we use credit cards at the shops.  We buy online using computers and hand-held devices. We need not count change; we can simply enter a figure representing the cost of our purchase on a digital screen.  In sum, Canadian children of primary school age scarcely remember that their parents once carried pennies in their pockets, let alone that they actually used the copper coins to make purchases.    “One penny buys a chocolate-dipped pickle.” becomes merely a line of amusing nonsense.

In part, uncertainty of intent may have led to this picture book’s various problems. It attempts to be both an entertaining fantasy and an engaging teaching tool.  The blurring of purposes here has not quite succeeded.

Reviewer: Leslie Aitken
Not recommended: 1 star out of 4

Leslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship included selection of books for school, public, special and academic libraries.  She is a former Curriculum Librarian for the University of Alberta.