Does your class have a favourite type of book?

Favourite Books: Does our class have a favourite type of book? is an inquiry that was published in Book 1 of the Thinking through Mathematics series. While the inquiry was originally designed for students aged 6-8 years of age, we have now aligned the mathematical intent of the inquiry with the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics. We think this inquiry would best suit exploration in a Year Three classroom but would also be good with Year Two or Year Four - the adaptations are provided below. Any childrens' book can be used to introduce the 'Maths Investigator' concept introduced in this unit.

This unit provides an opportunity for children to share their love of reading. It also enables reluctant readers to discover the types of books their peers are reading and hopefully encourage them to read some of the suggested books. The nature of the data collection offers opportunities for a variety of data representations to be trialled and evaluated.

Year Three
Work together with the students to formulate question(s) to investigate from books you read together. Guide students to plan their data collection process and support students to choose their own ways to represent their data.

• Identify questions or issues for categorical variables. Identify data sources and plan methods of data collection and recording. (ACMSP068)
• Collect data, organise into categories and create displays using lists, tables, picture graphs and simple column graphs, with and without the use of digital technologies. (ACMSP069)
• Interpret and compare data displays. (ACMSP070)

Year Four
Devise an everyday context that would necessitate the school librarian visiting the class to ask them to make decisions about favourite books. For example, a scenario that says Year Four have won the ‘Best Borrowers’ competition, which entitles the class to choose books for a library display. Invite the school librarian to share the context with the class and ask students: What are the best books to display, to represent our class? In Year Four, students can select and trial methods for data collection.  Remind students that graphs and tables are a way to help them understand and analyse the data as well as tools to communicate the answer. 

• Select and trial methods for data collection, including survey questions and recording sheets. (ACMSP095)
• Construct suitable data displays, with and without the use of digital technologies, from given or collected data. Include tables, column graphs and picture graphs where one picture can represent many data values. (ACMSP096)
• Evaluate the effectiveness of different displays in illustrating data features including variability. (ACMSP097)

Year Two
The Favourite Books inquiry can be used to introduce younger students to the idea of sorting data into categories to identify categorical variables (using Venn diagrams and Carroll diagrams). Students could sort books by genre or topic for example.

• Identify a question of interest based on one categorical variable. Gather data relevant to the question. (ACMSP048)
• Collect, check and classify data. (ACMSP049)
• Create displays of data using lists, table and picture graphs and interpret them. (ACMSP050)

If you are interested in trying this inquiry in your classroom, Favourite Books: Does our class have a favourite type of book?, download the inquiry unit from the Members section of this site for more detail. For more alignment information, including information about the Proficiencies, download the alignment document here.
We hope your students enjoy finding out which type of book is their class favourite.