Miss Lina’s Ballerinas by Grace Maccarone is about “teamwork, making new friends, and the pleasures of ballet.”
It’s also about math.
In my previous post, I wrote about multiplication in terms of groups of and arrays. Both models can be explored in Miss Lina’s Ballerinas. Eight ballerinas–Christina, Edwina, Sabrina, Justina, Katrina, Bettina, Marina, and Nina–dance in four groups of two
and four lines of two¹.
What happens when a new girl, Regina, arrives? Spoiler alert: three rows of three. What if there were ten dancers? Eleven? Twelve?
If you are playing along, Miss Lina’s Ballerinas falls into my third category; the math concept is between the pages but the author did not intend to write a math concept book.
¹ This bugs me. Should it?
Chris Hunter 