Navigating Early
Taylor Rozantz, Alysia Sturdivant, Josh
Inquiry Circle
Overview
* Navigating Early By Clare Vanderpool * Grade level 5- 8th grade * Summary: * After his mother’s death the young Jack Baker is uprooted from his home in Kansas and is placed in a boarding school in Maine. At the boarding school he feels lost and out of place. While trying to impress the boys and find a place in his school, he can’t help but be drawn to one of the misfits, Early Auden. Early is one of the strangest of boys, who reads the number pi as a story and collects clippings about the sightings of a great black bear in the nearby mountains. When Early decides to set out to find Pi and the black bear in his brother’s boat, the legendary “Fish”, Jack decides to join him. Through the course of their journey the boys begin to realize that Early’s story for Pi is starting to become reality as they come in contact with characters like pirates searching for treasure, a Norwegian still pining for his first love, and a 100 year old women still waiting for her son to come home. The irony of the story is that all 3 boys, Jack, Early and Pi, lost their direction in life and through their journeys they find a way to navigate their way back.
Why this book is a good choice for math? * The number PI is one of the most common constants in all of mathematics.
It is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction (when the numerator and denominator are integers). Nobody knows its exact value, because no matter how many digits you calculate it to, the number never ends. In math it’s obvious that we use PI in calculations for finding the circumference of a circle and finding areas of circles, cylinders, cones, and spheres. What most people don’t know is that PI is also used to calculate numbers that are used in different jobs: for example electrical engineers used pi to solve problems for electrical applications, statisticians use pi to track population
Inquiry Circle
Overview
* Navigating Early By Clare Vanderpool * Grade level 5- 8th grade * Summary: * After his mother’s death the young Jack Baker is uprooted from his home in Kansas and is placed in a boarding school in Maine. At the boarding school he feels lost and out of place. While trying to impress the boys and find a place in his school, he can’t help but be drawn to one of the misfits, Early Auden. Early is one of the strangest of boys, who reads the number pi as a story and collects clippings about the sightings of a great black bear in the nearby mountains. When Early decides to set out to find Pi and the black bear in his brother’s boat, the legendary “Fish”, Jack decides to join him. Through the course of their journey the boys begin to realize that Early’s story for Pi is starting to become reality as they come in contact with characters like pirates searching for treasure, a Norwegian still pining for his first love, and a 100 year old women still waiting for her son to come home. The irony of the story is that all 3 boys, Jack, Early and Pi, lost their direction in life and through their journeys they find a way to navigate their way back.
Why this book is a good choice for math? * The number PI is one of the most common constants in all of mathematics.
It is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction (when the numerator and denominator are integers). Nobody knows its exact value, because no matter how many digits you calculate it to, the number never ends. In math it’s obvious that we use PI in calculations for finding the circumference of a circle and finding areas of circles, cylinders, cones, and spheres. What most people don’t know is that PI is also used to calculate numbers that are used in different jobs: for example electrical engineers used pi to solve problems for electrical applications, statisticians use pi to track population