Math Monday: A Great New Picture Book

I picked up a great new math picture book from Cover to Cover last week. It is called Charlie-Piechart and the Case of the Missing Pizza Slice. Charlie has some friends over and they are ordering pizza.  There are 6 pizza eaters so everyone will get 2 slices. But then one slice goes missing so they are not sure what to do!

This is a great book about fractions and the one thing I think it explains well is parts in a group--for example when Charlie is trying to solve the mystery of who stole the piece of pizza, he knows that every person is 1 out of 5 or 1/5 of his suspects but as people are cleared, the fraction changes to 1/4 and 1/3 etc. as he looks at each suspect.

This is a fun story that will start lots of good conversations about fractions.  I am finding with 3rd graders, stories like this read over and over help kids make sense of some of the more complex math concepts.  So I am happy to have this one for our classroom.