Book Share 2- Pizza Counting

Book Title: Pizza Counting	Author: Christina Dobson
Illustrator: Matthew Holmes	Awards
Book Type: Picture	Approx. Reading Level: 4.5 (from Scholastic)
Age of Content Appropriateness: Grades 3 – 5 Could use the first 13 pages for earlier grades	Date Published:2003
Genre and Topic: Counting/Math	Personal Rating of the Book:  5
ISBN: (13 or 10 digit)978-0-88106-339-4

• Pizza Counting is a look at the world of numbers as they occur in sauce and cheese.  The tasty looking illustrations go from showing counting through quantities of toppings to fractions with slices.  There are great models of large numbers like 100, 1,000 and 131,000,000 and more.  There are sections on multiplication and fractions that help student visualize these concepts through a favorite food.  The information is accessible and fun.  Great for older students who are working on multiplication skills.  Each page also offers some pizza related trivia that students will be able to use to connect the ideas on the page with.

• This book can certainly be used for younger grades who are learning to count.  Pages 1-13 cover counting up to 30. 
• Older students can use the other pages to help with fractions  and visualizing large numbers.
• This could be used as a model to make their own pizza counts.  This could be done with construction paper or it could be done with real food if time, space and money allow.

Links for lesson plan ideas

o   IDU- lesson plan 8- Chicago Style Pizza

o   paid Pizza Fraction Game board- this printable game board cost .95 and requires dice and colored pencils to play- for two players.

o   My Fresh Plans- Pizza Classroom Theme- this site has some great ideas for using the book as well as many other pizza resources and books.  

• Vocabulary Words –

Equator- page 18- the distance around the earth at its widest part.

Anchovy- page 22- A very small fish with a strong flavor that some people really like on pizza.

• The one trait I would highlight from “6 + 1 Writing Traits,” would be presentation.  The pages in the book have wonderful vivid illustrations as well as a novel layout of information.  In the counting section there are equations going all around the pizzas and on the pages that show higher math concepts there are very clear visualizations of the fractions, multiplications or higher numbers.  There is also a lot of information added such as the trivia in a smaller font on each page.  With all that information the pages could look cluttered but they are very well composed. 

 Quote: "It's a tasty, quick meal, especially if it is a clock pizza with nine green pepper pieces, ten tiny meatballs, eleven onion strips, and twelve salami slices."  page 8

Quote: "If you were throwing a party for a giant, you might make ten of these super-giganto-mega-pizzas, with 100 pieces on top of each.  How many total pieces would that be?" page 16

Quote: "Americans eat more than enough pizza to reach the moon.  All of us together eat over 2,375,000,000 pizzas each year. " page 21
 

Concerns with This Book: none