The Greedy Triangle (Scholastic Bookshelf) - Softcover

Burns, Marilyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0545042208 ISBN 13: 9780545042208

Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks, 2008

Synopsis

Kids will get their early math skills in shape with this bestselling picture book--now available in Scholastic Bookshelf!

Bored and dissatisfied with his life, a triangle visits a local shapeshifter to add another angle to his shape. Poof! He becomes a quadrilateral. But then he gets greedy and keeps adding angles until he's completely transformed. Kids will enjoy this boldly colorful introduction to shapes and basic math concepts.

About this title

About the Author:

Author and math teacher Marilyn Burns is noted for her many books that instill an interest and enthusiasm for mathematics into her school-age readers. Her books use traditional and original literature to address mathematical concepts. In addition to her instructive children's books Marilyn is the author of many books for teachers. She has also written books for children about food, time, and Hanukkah. She says that her writing career began as a "fluke" when a friend asked her to write a book about math. This was the jumping off point for her literary career, during which she has written about a dozen books for children and the same number for teachers. She currently gives lectures and lessons in schools. Burns was born in 1941 and resides in Sausalito, CA.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author of The I Hate Mathematics Book celebrates geometric shapes in this informative but visually cluttered addition to the Marilyn Burns Brainy Day series. Her main character, a triangle with gleaming black eyes and a perky grin, leads a full life-it can take the shape of a slice of pie or rest in an elbow's angle "when people put their hands on hips." Yet the triangle aspires to greater complexity, so it asks a "shapeshifter" to turn it into a quadrilateral (the shape of a TV or a book's page), then into a pentagon (a house's facade) and so forth. Burns fails to show that the triangle is "greedy"; it's just adventurous. But her story successfully introduces basic polygons, and her afterword to adults suggests ways of teaching children some of the finer points about geometry (e.g., the concept of a plane or rhomboids). For his picture book debut, Silveria chooses tart shades of yellow, orange, lavender and green. His airbrushed colored-pencil compositions have suitably angular details; speckled paint and multicolored doodles soften the effect but create a sense of disorder. If the art as a whole is somewhat jumbled, readers still come away from this volume noticing and naming the shapes of the objects around them. Ages 6-9.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0545042208
• ISBN 13: 9780545042208
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Silveria Gordon