I’m Trying to Love Math by Bethany Barton is told in alternating black-and-purple fonts, and an unnamed narrator (assumed to be a human) and a purple alien have a discussion about math, with the alien pointing out all the ways that the narrator has used math in his explanations: such as fractions and ratios. Math is

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Sir Circumference and the Dragon of Pi by Cindy Neuschwander, illustrated by Wayne Geehan. Sir Circumference is a silly story that uses finding pi as a solution to a problem: the Knight Sir Circumference has been turned into a dragon. Characters named Radius and Lady Di of Ameter help him by finding a potion with poetic instructions telling

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Circles by David Adler, illustrated by Edward Miller. Adler’s book introduces circles and then describes a hands-on method of learning what a diameter and radius are (tracing a plate, then folding symmetrically and drawing lines). Subsequent pages continue the hands-on directions to draw and define major and minor sectors of a circle and how to draw

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Perfect Square by Michael Hall (Greenwillow, 2011) is a book my son (currently 4) and I discovered a few months ago before the Cybils even began. Whenever he sees it on a shelf in the library he calls out in excitement, “Look, Mommy! The Perfect Square book!” (And somehow, we keep seeing it everywhere!) In Perfect Square, a

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The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and classically illustrated by Jules Feiffer (1961) is a book for the clever reader. The book is full of wonderful wordplay, cliché, word stereotypes, and logic puzzles for a young child (and the adult!) to chuckle over and enjoy. In the story, the young Milo is bored of school

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Because of my positive experience reading Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, I thought I’d try some more Japanese literature. Amanda wrote a positive review of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa and I noticed that this was the selected book for the Japanese Literature Book Group run by tanabata at In Spring it

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