The Great Math Bottle Battle Essay

The Great Math Tattle Battle is written by Anne Bowen and illustrated by Jamie Zollars in a fictional way. It starts off with one of the main characters, Harley Harrison being the best math student in the second grade. Throughout the story he keeps writing notes to his teacher, Mr. Hall, tattling on other students. He does this in an unusual way. Within his notes he uses math problems, usually addition. For example he tells on one of the other students and says he steals different amounts of erasers from the class each day. He writes down how many the other student takes each day and adds them up to tell his teacher the total amount were stolen by this person in the entire week. He continues doing this until a new student shows up who thinks
she knows everything as well. She then tattles on Harley. Near the end they get paired up to work on an addition test and they realize they really need each other’s help to get by and together they can be even smarter and learn more. They them become friends and do addition together rather than against each other through these tattling notes. This children’s book focuses on addition and some of the ways this can be done. This book, when speaking about different ways to add single and mutlidigits umbers, relates to the Massachusetts Math Curriculum Frameworks. It fits in with the second grade standards within “operations and algebraic thinking.” It matches the 2.OA.1 standard which discusses using addition and subtraction within 100 to solve word problems. All of the notes that the two students write are word problems based off of the behaviors of other children in their class and they use addition to solve the word problem which always have a sum of 100 or less. It also is part of 2.OA.2 which says students need to be able to fluently add and subtract two, one digit numbers. At the beginning of the story, most of Harley’s notes have one digit numbers for him to add and he does so easily. The mathematics content in this book is all correct and accurate and therefore on the evaluation scale, this book would get a rating of 5.
The work is shown out and all of the additions are correct. The book’s mathematics content is visible and effectively present throughout the entire story. Addition is clearly shown on almost every page and the diagrams and written work to solve each problem is also shown as part of the illustration. The student’s actual worksheets and notes are drawn out so readers can clue into his thinking process while working on them. For these reasons I would give it a 5 in this category as well. The book’s mathematics content is intellectually and developmentally appropriate for its audience of second graders. Along with being about addition it also discusses the topic of working together, and knowing the difference between tattling and telling when things need to be told. This is a huge topic for students in early elementary school. I would give it a 5 for this. I would give it a rating of a 4 for the category of the book facilitating the reader’s involvement in, and use and transfer of, its mathematics. It is good but it doesn’t have any problems for the students to figure out or any activities that specifically go with it like the percentage book did above. The book’s mathematics and story complement each other well, a 5 for that as well. It can relate the addition to the story and make it fiction and not just straight facts. It makes it more
interesting for the students to read and pay attention to. It also has pictures that the students can enjoy as they read. I would say the book is about a 3, or average, on being a good resource needed to help readers benefit from the book’s mathematics. It is helpful for students to see how addition can be used in word problems and real life situations however it doesn’t, in words, explain how each problem is solved. If I was teaching a second grade class about addition I would definitely use this book. I would most likely wait until later on in the year when students have already learned different ways to add and subtract single and multi-digit facts. This was it would be a review and for each problem that is shown in the book we could go over how it relates to things we have already done in class. As an extension, we could find ways other than the ones Harley uses to solve each of the problems in the book. Each student could be asked to solve the problems in their own way and then they could be compared to the way the book does it. This way students can review the different methods. I could also have each student create their own notes after reading the book. This would give the students practice creating and solving word problems. After each student creates their own they can than trade notes and try and solve each other’s. We could make a classroom book of these and put it on display in the classroom. When students finish their work early they could come pick it up and try solving some of the other word problems made by students in the class. This is a great math book for students in 2nd grade and teachers can create many projects based around it.