Math and Science Across Cultures

I'm in the middle of reorganizing my entire library, and it's an interesting process!

We are largely using the Dewey Decimal classification system, since so many ex-library books are donated to us with the call numbers already on the spine, but I also need to think in terms of "where would I look for this book when I need it?" and "is this book a teacher resource or a student resource?"

NOTE: This is a useful website for figuring out the call number for a topic. Click on any box to expand the subcategories for that category so that you can be more precise, or if you just love decimals.

The fiction area is upstairs -- chapter books in the hallway, picture books and poetry in Zac's bedroom -- and the nonfiction area is downstairs. Most of the time the nonfiction books are for my personal use in preparing for a main lesson block, but several sections are for the children to use when researching and writing reports or reading about a topic of personal interest.

And, when it comes to reports, nothing is more aggravating than a book that contains a collection of small biographies about famous people. You have no easy way of knowing WHO is in the book, and if a student wants to research someone (like a child wanting to read more about Al Capone in U.S. History last year), it's not intuitive which resources on the shelf to go fetch.

Last school year I made a list of all the people in How They Croaked, How They Choked, Caught!, How They Lost Their Heads, and 10 at 10. It is here.

Now, here is a new book to add to that "odds and ends" category. It is called Math and Science Across Cultures (510.7, by the way).

Math and Science Across Cultures:
Activities and Investigations from the Exploratoreum
by Maurice Bazin, et al.

This is a wonderful book but unless you were doing a specific main lesson block on it you'd likely forget that you had it. So here are the chapters:

Patterns and Play

Sona: Sand Drawings from Africa [Chokwe]

Cuica: Making Music in Brazil

Madagascar Solitaire: Playing Games


Counting and Calendars

Quipus: The Inca Counting System

Counting Like an Egyptian: Math in Ancient Egypt

Breaking the Mayan Code: Mayan Math

The Mayan Calendar Round: Keeping Time


Social and Cultural Traditions

Weaving Baskets: Discovering Patterns and Symmetries

Dyeing: Colors from Nature

Tea and Temperature: Chinese Traditions


Subsistence and Survival

Rain in a Bottle: Collecting Water in the Kalahari Desert [!Kung]

From Arrows to Rockets: Flight Stability

Building Terraces: Irrigation in Rural China

Mud Bricks: Making African Houses Stronger

I have a mental note about the quipus and the Ancient Egyptian math, and we've done those lessons, but I had completely forgotten about the others. I love the !Kung solar still with an ostrich egg!!! And we do have a source for whole and partial ostrich egg shells... Salger's Ostrich Farm, which Zac and I visited on the Fall Farm Crawl a few weeks ago. We got to see baby ostriches hatching in the incubator!

Hopefully by having the table of contents of this book written down here, when I search my blog for posts about a certain topic, it will pop up. And then I'll remember about it! Actually, I had a student in Science Club ask me lots of questions about irrigation ditches (when I was demonstrating the Ancient Egyptian Level), so I may plan that activity for his Morning Math.

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