CYBILS NOMINEES- TWO BY DAVID ADLER

According to his website, David Adler has written over 200 books. It's not surprising, then, that several of them, at least three that I can count, would end up as CYBILS nominees. Two are related to math

I could have used FRACTIONS, DECIMALS, AND PERCENTS on Friday. I had gone into a sixth grade classroom and was waiting for the teacher to finish a math lesson so we could start writing. Most of the kids have at least some understanding of money-- they visit the neighborhood convenience store on a fairly regular basis. Many of these same students, however, were more than a little confused during Friday's lesson on converting fractions into decimals, and FRACTIONS, DECIMALS, AND PERCENTS would have been a nice segue. Adler uses the prices and signs at a county fair to demonstrate how fractions, decimals, and percentages are related to each other, then review place value and demonstrates how to convert fractions to decimals. He also devotes several pages to explaining when people might use each term, e.g. "If the man at the pie eating contest ate four full pies and half of another pie, he would probably say, 'I ate four and 1/2 pies…he would probably not say 'I ate four pies and 50% of a fifth pie.'" The book would be a terrific math lesson for any intermediate grade teacher, especially if he/she had a document camera so that kids could have some time to examine the illustrations.

Adler's other math-related CYBILS nominee is TIME ZONES. If you have ever had the experience of explaining of trying to explain time zones to a group of eyebrow raising, incredulous/doubtful/non-believing children (and I have, several times) you will definitely appreciate TIME ZONES. Adler opens the book explaining what children in various places around the world would be doing when it is 6 am in Los Angeles. He then covers such topics as how time zones came to be, why time zone lines aren't straight (so they don't go divide major cities), and the International Date Line. The illustrations are clever collage combinations of an astronaut flying children around the world, aliens, clocks, maps, and even a photograph of the International Meridian Conference in 1884. Appendices in the back include a map of U.S. time zones, an explanation of Daylight Savings Time, and an experiment for kids to try.

Another great read aloud for math time.

P.S. I apologize for the way the images are appearing. Not quite sure what I am doing wrong today but everything is going all over the page.