Book Analysis: The Napping House

The Napping House (1984) is a children’s book that illustrates an interesting story about a family and their journey into attempting to get to sleep. Each page a new person or animal piles onto the last person. It starts with a bed in the house, then a granny, then child and so on. As the story builds suspense, the additions continue to decrease in size finishing with a tiny flea. Amazingly enough, the flea creates an amazing ripple effect by biting the mouse and the mouse is startled to say the least. The disruption startles the cat, which effects the dog and then the child and granny. Chaos erupts and everyone and thing that was piled on the bed is in the air with smiles on their faces. When the dust settles everyone is awake and the day

This is the perfect opportunity to take that expression or equation that was built in the first half and start the process of finding x. Combining terms and subtracting numbers from both sides will aid in the process of the ultimate goal of finding the unknown number. Many times teachers us a balance with chess pieces and students have a hard time visualizing why 2 paws have to be taken from both sides. The Napping House (1984) clearly depicts how subtraction needs to occur on both sides of the equation. Ultimately, just like balancing equations, the story ends beautifully with everyone and everything

Often times this sort of phenomena will happen with an elementary teacher that grappled with mathematics when they were in school. These teachers had nightmares as children and the feelings may be lingering a bit. By employing literature, they are able to tap into their strengths of language arts and impart that skill into creative mathematics instruction. Literature has many benefits in the mathematics classroom. “There are often several tasks that can be launched from the story,” (Van de Walle, Karp, & Bay Williams, 2013, p. 39) which is a skill that is especially important as concepts start to compound. Mathematics problems do not exist in a vacuum and literature can play a major role in building the skills to combat multitask