Tiger Math: Learning to Graph from a Baby Tiger

Collaboration Cuties Must Read Mentor Text Linky time--this week's topic: MATH...

Just the other day, my grandson and I stopped to pick up a few things in my classroom.  His eyes were caught by a book on the top of a basket because we had just played our "Guess that Animal" game in the car on the way there.  The cover had a baby tiger on it--our most recent animal...  I looked at the basket and saw that it was in the Teaching Stories: Math basket, and that made me think about how few times the kids even got into that basket last year, and then I got ti thinking about how I want to add some math texts to guided math time this year. 

I remembered briefly using the book that my grandson spotted, Tiger Math: Learning to Graph from a Baby Tiger by Ann Whitehead Nagda & Cindy Bickel, when I taught fifth grade.  I have not used the text with second graders, but it will be a great text to use with enriched second grade math students for an independent exploration. The text steps beyond second grade math standards a bit by showing double bar, line graphs, and a simple pie/circle graph--yet this will provide a perfect extension for some students. The text shows real-life uses of different types of graphs, and it gives a wonderful nonfiction account of a baby tiger as it grows and changes.   

About the Book form amazon.com: A Siberian tiger cub born at the Denver Zoo is orphaned when he is just a few weeks old. At first T. J. refuses to eat his new food, and it requires the full attention of the zoo staff to ensure that he grows into a huge, beautiful, and very healthy tiger.  Through photographs, narrative, and graphs, young readers follow T.J. as he grows from a tiny newborn into a five-hundred-pound adult. A heartwarming story about one tiger’s fight for survival that also introduces a basic math skill.

Here are just two of the graph pages from the book.  You can also see a nice preview at amazon.com!

 

I plan to create a general response sheet that can be used with any of the graphs in the book.  Here are some of the questions I will ask...

• What type of graph is shown?
• What is the title of the graph?
• What is the subject of this graph? What information about the baby tiger (or tigers) is it showing you?
• Write two things you learned from reading the graph. 
• What "I wonder..." questions do you have?

Ann Whitehead Nagda has a website where you can learn about her 4 other non-fiction math teaching texts that she has written.  I will be ordering Panda Math: Learning About Subtraction from Hua Mei and Mei Sheng.

Fly on over to Collaboration Cuties to read about more math mentor texts...  See you tomorrow for Monday Made It!