Children's Books for Algebra 2 Part 2

Children's books are a great way to get students interested in your content. Picking the right book is more difficult for the topic area. Here are three more children's books perfect for Algebra 2 class.

We are Growing by Laurie Keller

This book shows grass growing, yes literally. A theme the book has is that being unique is okay and that everyone is different.

A great math topic for using this book would be introducing unit rates or graphing linear functions. You could have some real grass growing in different stages per day and ask them if grass growing is linear or not? It would be a good exploratory lesson on linear functions.

You can further go into graphing and think about what non-linear grass would look like? How long would it take to cut the grass?

Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae

The giraffe believes he can't dance, but with words of encouragement he learns that he can dance in his own way.

In the book there are a bunch of different animals dancing. It would be a perfect time to look into transformations, you can look at it in a variety of different ways from linear transformations to parabolic transformations.

It will be good for students to look for similarities and differences. With the book you can even include more social learning skills learning about kindness and encouraging others.



Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin

Dragons love tacos. They love chicken tacos, beef tacos, great big tacos, and teeny tiny tacos. So if you want to lure a bunch of dragons to your party, you should definitely serve tacos. Buckets and buckets of tacos. Unfortunately, where there are tacos, there is also salsa. And if a dragon accidentally eats spicy salsa . . . oh, boy. You're in red-hot trouble.


In the classroom this book would be a great introduction to probability. You could talk about what goes in a taco. What ingredients it would take, alternatives, how many different types of tacos are there?

Gas Station Problem and Unit Rates

I was at Hy-Vee the other day filling up using our fuel save points when an interesting question popped into my head.  I was thinking if you were a gas station attendant how could you know if a person was using a fuel saver and which pump had the highest fuel saver discount based on the number of gallons and fuel price.

I made this activity to engage student thinking about Unit Rates and instead of fuel saver points they have to find which pumps are losing them money.

So I creepily took down the notes of every pump at the local Hy-Vee gas station, luckily enough I did the math on them all and had some surprising results.

The assignment is here: https://goo.gl/BYaiSn

It focuses on higher thinking about unit rates than we might typically cover.

After students complete this part of the task they have follow up questions:

1. Which pumps need to be fixed?
2. How much money was lost if we make $.10 on each gallon sold? Show your work.
3. How much money did we make?
4. How did you find your answers? (Write one paragraph)