Measuring Penny- A Math Must Read Mentor Text

Happy Monday!

It's time for another Must Read Mentor Text! Today's text is a Must Read for Math! I love incorporating literature into Math whenever I can. It's a great way to hook your students at the beginning of a new unit or to show them real world examples of Math all around them!  :)

Our Must Read Mentor Text is Measuring Penny by Loreen Leedy. It's an adorable book (it has all these cute dogs and I LOVE dogs!), but it's also so comprehensive. It covers all different types of measurement from length to time to capacity. It would be great to introduce your study of measurement or to review at the end!

Here's a summary from Amazon.com- "Lisa has an important homework assignment--to measure something in several different ways. She has to use standard units like inches and nonstandard units like paper clips to find out height, width, length, weight, volume, temperature, and time. Lisa decides to measure her dog, Penny, and finds out ...

Penny's nose = 1 inch long
Penny's tail = 1 dog biscuit long
Penny's paw print = 3 centimeters wide... and that's only the beginning! 

Lisa learns a lot about her dog and about measuring, and even has fun doing it. This clear and engaging concept book, delivered with a sense of humor, is certain to win over the most reluctant mathematician."

There are so many ways that you can use this mentor text, but here are a few of our ideas!

1. Have students measure the lengths and heights of objects around the school using standard and nonstandard units of measurement. Since Lisa measured dogs, she used dog biscuits. Since your students are measuring classroom objects, let them use paperclips or sticky notes or something else you have handy. I like to buy the fun seasonal erasers from the dollar store and let students measure with those- it's very engaging to measure with tiny bats or spiders!  :)  And, if you teach upper elementary students, you can even have them convert units like inches to feet or yards or millimeters to centimeters or meters.  

2. Let students bring in a stuffed animal to measure. They can measure with standard and nonstandard units, and then you can compile all of the data onto a class measurement chart or graph. You can review or introduce graphing when you make a class bar graph, and then create math problems using the graph. It would be a great way to compare measurements using greater than, less than, or equal to signs. Or, throw in addition and subtraction while asking questions like, "How many more students have a stuffed animal with a height of 10 inches than a height of 8 inches?"

3. Use the page showing Penny's Time Schedule to review elapsed time. You can ask students questions like, "How much time passes from the time Penny nibbles on dog biscuits to the time she gnaws on a bone?" You can also let students create a class time schedule of the school day or a time schedule of their Saturday. Then, students can ask each other (or you can ask) elapsed time questions using the schedules they created. 

We hope that you enjoy this book and can use some of these ideas with your students! 

Thanks for stopping by! Please check back each Monday for a new Must Read Mentor Text!  :)

Have a GREAT week!