Mathematics in a Story - Christopher Counting

Summary

The title of the book is Christopher Counting, written by Valeri Gorbachev.

The story starts where Christopher Rabbit sitting in class while his professor was teaching the class counting 1 to 10. Then after Christopher left school he started to count everything he sees on his way, the story shows how much Christopher loves counting. Ever since he learned to count at school, he counts everything. He counts everything in his backpack; he counts everything in the house; he counts steps as he walks downstairs; he counts times of the stone skipping on the water; he counts when he plays hide-and-seek with other friends. Finally when it is time to bed, Christopher is so exhausted because of counting all day. Before he is urged to bed by his mother, he suddenly remembers he forgets to count something -- STARS! When Christopher sits on the front porch and counts the stars in the sky, he finally realizes that it is impossible to count everything!

I don’t have enough knowledge on books for children. So, I chose it based on the title and after I read the story I found how much I can relate math to a simple story like Christopher Counting.

Ways in which it relates to Math

Input/Output

Geometry

Parabola

Calculus/Leibniz

The story starts with a classroom having 8 students, one of them is Christopher the rabbit. All were sitting on their desks, each desk was a rectangular shaped having  (length * width) and 4 angles. Ms. Goat was teaching the students how to count through a basket of oranges demonstration. The input here is Ms. Goat who was giving new information/numbers and how they should be counted for her students. The output was every student who was repeating after her the numbers. Christopher rabbit loved the new topic he learned counting from 1 to 10. He left school counting everything he sees. His cubic shaped aquarium of fish that has 8 vertices/ corners, 12 edges and 6 faces/sides, and circle shaped plates with radius, diameter. All his stuff were counted!

Then Christopher Rabbit decided to discover the outside and see what he can count there, he went to a close by lake and saw Beaver throwing stones into the lake. The picture shows how Beaver was making continues parabola with circular waves; the wave has 3 dimensions.

So, all the parabolas Beaver created were facing down because in our quadratic function

ax² + bx + c   if a < 0 then the parabola opens down.

Finally, Christopher rabbit decides to leave Beaver and go somewhere else to count everything!

Before he went to bed he decided to count the stars, and he gave up and started crying because he found out that counting the stars was just impossible. That’s what we call infinity – after I searched for it I saw a familiar name from our class, Leibniz, was the co-inventor of infinitesimal calculus. “To Leibniz, both infinitesimals and infinite quantities were ideal entities, not of the same nature as appreciable quantities, but enjoying the same properties” Wikipeda

Infinity in limits where something doesn’t have limits ∞. For example, the set of integers is countably infinite, while the infinite set of real numbers is uncountable.

Why is literature an effective way to teach/learn a mathematical concept?

I do believe that literature makes things easier like math. Instead of working with numbers, we apply math to stories or we extract math from the story. It does make a difficult concept more understandable in an easy way. Also, it makes math fun for all ages especially kids since I did go through a child’s book having no clue I would find one thing related to math.

So, in my opinion literature has a good effect on teaching and a faster way for understanding.

If we get functions, formulas and math concepts out of simple stories like Christopher Counting then math shouldn’t be a nightmare for most kids =)