Monday Math Literature: Fun with Balloons and Counting

Every once in a while I will stumble upon a math literature book that my students and I can not get enough of.  Today I want to tell you about one of our new favorite books,  Zero, Zilch, Nada Counting to None

This book is about a young rabbit who gets a job in a balloon factory.  He is asked to blow up 100 balloons for a party.  He has a set of 10 racks with 10 slots in each rack to put the balloons in.  He blows up all 100 balloons and then tries counting to make sure there really are 100.  He gets ideas from other animals that are stopping by to drop things off.  He counts by 10's, 5's, 2's, and 1's.  The only problem is that he can't seem to keep track of which ones have already been counted.  He decides that the solution to this problem will be to pop each balloon as it as counted.  This leads to a hilarious conclusion and a great opportunity to talk with your students about how to organize and keep track when counting objects.  It is also a great chance to discuss and practice skip counting.  Even if I did nothing with the rich opportunities to discuss math in this book, I would still read it to students because it is an amazing story.  This book pairs well with counting and estimating routines and would be a great introduction or follow up to these ideas.  

If your students need more work on skip counting you might want to check out these other blog posts:

10 Ways to Work on Counting by 2

Count by 2 Math Literature

Teaching Math with You Tube Videos: Counting

Also our next book study starts this coming Sunday!  Head over to this post to read more about it!