Review Detail

‘How Do You Share with Your Friends?: A Math Book about Fractions, Decimals, & Percents’ by Lucy D. Hayes, illustrated by Srimalie Bassani, engages kids in learning about fractions, decimals, and percents by stating that these are three different ways people can talk about pieces of a whole or parts of a group.

For fractions, a cake is used to describe the breakdown. If a cake is made and split in two, then each of two people get one-half of the cake. If there are four people who each get a piece, they each get one-quarter. For decimals, a lemonade stand concept is used, and a full dollar is shown with a breakdown to pennies and how one hundred pennies equals one dollar, and one penny equals one-hundredth of a dollar, or $0.01. Thinking about quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies is important in learning how to break money into decimals. Percent-wise, it’s pretty cool how it states that “percent” really means “per cent” or a number out of 100, much like how each individual penny adds up so that once there are 100, there is a full dollar at hand.

At the end of the book, it invites readers to do an activity to figure out pizza party fractions. By making a pizza to share with family or friends, one can see fractions and decimals in the recipe and cut up the pizza when it’s ready to break it down even more. Readers can also create grids or look at the chart in the very back of the book to reference the differences between fractions, percents, and decimals that all relate to the same numbers. Anyone who needs a little extra push in learning how to figure out these math concepts will find this book useful in the process.