The Doorbell Rang by Pat Hutchinson

     The title of the book that I read was "The Doorbell Rang" by Pat Hutchinson. The story is all about grandma's cookies and how no one else can make cookies the way that Grandma can. The story starts out with two children who have been given twelve cookies by their mom that their grandma sent over for a snack. Throughout the book, pictures illustrate how more and more friends come over and they keep having to devise a plan for all of their friends and themselves to get the same number of cookies. The number of children that come over for grandma's cookies starts to get unreasonable and after the cookies are all gone, all of the children are still hungry for more cookies since they had to keep distributing them equally. In the end, everyone is upset about how many cookies they didn't get to eat, but grandma shows up by surprise to bring everyone an entire batch of cookies for everyone to fill their stomachs with. The illustrations in the book help the reader to understand the changing emotions of the kids as they all start to get less and less cookies as more friends show up.

     The main mathematical concept covered in this book is division of real numbers. It is a skill used in many algebra problems when trying to solve for a single variable and many other real life situations. This book is all about the children who all want grandma's cookies, and figuring out a way to spread the cookies equally among the two kids and all of their cookie-hungry friends that all want a share of the cookies. The story begins with two children who are tasked with scarfing down twelve cookies, which meant each of them would get six cookies to themselves. Then more and more kids start to come and it is more difficult for the children to divide the cookies up evenly. It gets to a point where there are 10 kids who all want cookies, and they figure that since you can't divide twelve cookies evenly for ten kids, they can each only have one. This book does a very good job of illustrating basic division skills and how when you there is no even solution to a division problem, then you have to round up or down depending on the situation. The expression used in this story is simple, depending on how many friends were over is how much you would divide by twelve.

     I think that literature is a very effective way to teach more simple mathematic concepts because most of implement pictures and easy and very readable language to teach children these simple concepts. They match up a story to help children when they are faced with these situations in real life and when in the classroom with real math problems in front of them. If kids read these books and remember how they are set up and how the story explains the math then it is much easier for them to memorize how the problems are meant to be solved.