Do Weasels Count the Weeks? Sizing Up Winter by Lizann Flatt

WHEN WINTER WINDS BLOW,
COLD ICE CRYSTALS GROW.
HIGH IN THE CLOUDS,
IS THERE ONE SIZE FOR SNOW?

Lizann Flatt's third book in her series, Sizing Up Winter (Math in Nature) (OwlKids Books, 2013), takes an open-ended look at the concept of measurement in a wintry setting. How far does a snowflakes fall?

It depends--on where it starts and where it ends!

There are plenty of regular counting activities in this imaginative look at winter in snowy climes: how many otters in two different lakes, how many hops does it take a snowshoe hare and a deer mouse to cover the same area, and how many days does it take a weasel to go from wintry white to warm weather brown? Other numerical skills have their moments: estimation (Which has more mass, the mama polar bear or her twin babies?) and comparison (Which frog is the fattest?). But the author also dips into the concept of relativity in scale, using one chickadee or one cardinal as units of measurement:

HOW MANY BIRDS LONG IS EACH FEEDER?

One curious double-page spread shows the typical musk oxen protective circle as conceived as a clock face and asks what time it is by the ox clock, an intriguingly open-ended question.

And one spread points to the difference between man-made objective measurements and subjective measurements:

SO HOW LONG IS WINTER, AND HOW DO YOU KNOW?
IS IT WINTER AS LONG AS IT'S COLD AND THERE'S SNOW?
WHEN WILL WINTER BE OVER? WHAT DAY WILL IT GO?

Is it still winter if it snows in May? Or June? For the child whose mind enjoys calculating outside as well as inside the box, beyond the everyday rules of measurement of distance, area, capacity, mass, and time, Sizing Up Winter (Math in Nature) offers a chance to rehearse the usual counting skills while realizing that they are themselves human constructs, our agreed-upon language for appraising the natural world, necessary but not sufficient to the whole of nature. Ashley Barron's cheery cut-paper collage illustrations make this book inviting to young eyes, and the author's appended "Nature Notes" offer tantalizing thumbnail descriptions of some of the more northerly animals, such as snow fleas and snowy owls, featured in this Canadian production .  It's not your father's counting book, as Kirkus Reviews suggests, saying "When read with a caring adult, this may challenge readers to look at measurement in a different way."

Other books in the Math In Nature series include Counting on Fall (Math in Nature) and Sorting Through Spring (Math in Nature) (see my reviews here).

Roundup! Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature by Joyce Sidman

A SPIRAL IS A GROWING SHAPE.
IT STARTS SMALL
AND GETS BIGGER,
SWIRL BY SWIRL.

It's not every day that a new book makes a reviewer jump (or in this case swirl) with joy. But Joyce Sidman's and Beth Krommes' new Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) is such a book. Newbery winner (for Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems (Caldecott Honor Book, BCCB Blue Ribbon Nonfiction Book Award))) Joyce Sidman provides a lyrical text which only adds to the striking beauty of Caldecott artist (for The House in the Night) Beth Krommes' lissome illustrations, gloriously done on bright white in amazingly detailed scratchboard and watercolor wash, inspiring wonder at the beauty and function of the nature's amazing spiral.

IT TWISTS THROUGH THE AIR
WITH CLOUDS ON ITS TAIL.

IT STRETCHES STARRY ARMS
THROUGH SPACE.
SPINNING AND SPARKLING,
FOREVER EXPANDING.

From the protected curl of a hibernating snake or chipmunk, to the unfolding wonder of a fiddlehead fern, from the tactile and visual beauty of a spiral seashell to the delicate tendrils of a growing vine, the spiral is one of nature's finest architectural creations, one which protects the threatened hedgehog and gives the New World monkey his astonishingly strong prehensile tail.

From a delicate orb spider's web to the power of a breaking wave, spirals are everywhere, present in the terrible beauty of the tornado and the star-studded structure of the Milky Way galaxy which is our place in space. The spiral serves us, fills us with awe, and with its curvaceous form delights the human eye with its mathematical perfection.

Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature is a unique and magnetic picture book, one bound to be in contention for medal honors, and one deserving of an honored place in any collection, private or public.

Heavy, Man! On the Scale, a Weighty Tale by Brian P. Cleary

Weighing things is how we find
the heaviness of stuff--
a soccer ball,
great-grandma's shawl,
a bag of pillow fluff.

Making sense of mathematical concepts is no laughing matter in the elementary grades, but a bit of jolly rhyme and some zany, rainbow-colored cats on your side couldn't hurt. To that end, Brian P. Cleary and Brian Gable are back with their latest entry in their very popular concept series, Math Is Categorical/Words Are Categorical (Millbrook Press).

On the Scale, a Weighty Tale (Math Is Categorical) takes on weighty matters in its explanation of the traditional "English" measurement system (now properly termed the "American/Canadian" system since the U.K. has virtually dropped it) and its rival, the metric system. Cleary carefully associates the terms for weight with common objects to give the reader the "feel" as well as the terminology for each unit:

An ounce is just the thing to use
for very light amounts.
That slice of bread
you've just been fed?
It weighs about an ounce.

Gable's frolicking cats and apprentice mice illustrate each concept humorously, as when in the verse above we see a perturbed feline storekeeper in the process of selling a full loaf as a larcenous gray mouse makes off with a stack of sixteen slices. The text then proceeds to illustrate the concept of the 16-ounce pound and the 2,000-pound ton:

A ton is huge--
it takes 2,000 pounds
to make just 1.
Cars, and whales upon the scales
are measured by the ton.

Cleary and Gable next scale their story to the metric system, beginning with its smallest common unit, comparing each metric unit to its American cousin to create a frame of reference for the reader:

A gram is not a cracker
and it's not your parents' mothers.
It's a weight,
so get this straight--
it's smaller than most others.

A dollar bill or paper clip
weigh near 1 gram, you know.
Inside 1 ounce, you can announce,
there's 28 or so.

The author continues with the kilogram and the metric ton:

1,000 kilograms are what
make up 1 metric ton--
about as heavy as a Chevy
(at least the smaller one.)

Cleary and Gable's humorous but light-hearted look at hefty matters of measure makes a great introduction to a subject so often weighed down by hard-to-remember tables of measure to be memorized. Bouncy verse and comic illustrations help the basics of weight stick without weighing upon the mind, until at last the reader is graduated, magnitude cum laude:

You've picked up lots of "heavy" words
and now you know enough
to teach a class, because--alas--
you've learned a TON of stuff.

At a bargain price, this title and others in these two notable co-series do an admirable job in explaining grammatical terms and mathematical operations to the elementary reader. Take a look, for example, at their tantalizingly titled How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear?: What Are Homonyms and Homophones? (Words Are Categorical), Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What Is an Adjective? (Words Are Categorical), Pitch and Throw, Grasp and Know: What Is a Synonym? (Words Are Categorical), and, that wordsmith's favorite, Rhyme & Punishment: Adventures in Wordplay. And for the numerically numb, see, for example, The Action of Subtraction (Math Is Categorical) and The Mission of Addition (Math Is Categorical).

Great for teachers, homeschoolers, and just plain interested parents, and fun enough for kids to pick them up on their own, this title and its series mates make a good jumping off place for some heavy-duty concepts.

Who's Counting? A Million Dots by Andrew Clements

Look at the center of this page. Right at the very center.
Look carefully.
.
That's one dot.
One dot is not very many.
It's just one, and that's just one more than none.

A journey to a million dots begins with a single spot. Andrew Clements' clever over sized nonfiction picture book starts small on its way to a million, but there is a lot of fun along the way for students who are fascinated by BIG NUMBERS.

In clever pixillated illustrations which begin totting up the count, Clements' A Million Dots totals up many a fanciful and fantastic fact using big numbers. On the way to one million, he starts relatively small:

A person must climb 1860 steps to the top of the Empire State Building.

It's 24,901 miles around the earth.

A sooty tern can fly 87,600 hours nonstop after it leaves the nest.

But then, consider these number-crunching facts:

There were more than 500,000 cars junked in the U.S. in the past 16 days!

There are 615,000 different words explained in the Oxford English Dictionary!

An arctic tern flies more than 650,000 miles in a lifetime. (Terns really rock, apparently!)

There are 996,480 still pictures in the movies, E.T., Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Lion King, Forrest Gump, and Home Alone.

The millionth dot gets special treatment, appearing solo on the final page. Although Clements warns that it would take over eleven days to count all 1,000,000 of the dots which compose the illustrations in this book, some kids may want to try. But even if the prospective bean counters poop out before the task is completed, just trying to conceive of what goes into a million of anything is a mind-expanding experience.

Mike Reed's illustrations, composed of and superimposed upon, well, a million dots, work plenty of humor into showing the many fascinating facts. The far-flying tern is tricked out as a typical tourist, clutching maps, camera, luggage, and a passport under one wing, while an astronaut cow jumps the 238,857 miles over the moon. As an amazing and tempting browsing book, A Million Dots should take its place with David Schwartz' classic How Much Is a Million? 20th Anniversary Edition (Reading Rainbow Book). on anybody's math shelf.