A Chair for My Mother

Vera B. Williams

HarperTrophy (now HarperCollins), 1984

This beautiful story about a little girl who learns how to save money and how to persevere after a tragedy. The family saves enough money in a jar to buy a big chair to put into their new home after a fire. This book won the Caldecott award and is wonderful to have in your collection. This book also brings a concept of a single parent family although the child lives with multiple adult relatives that parent. These concepts are all wonderful to have in any child's life.

Math activities include:

-By using counters or coins to fill a jar and guess how many are inside. Try it for a week or a month and see how long it takes to fill up the jar.

-The book mentions goldilocks and the three bears when picking the chair out. This can lead to sorting sizes and shapes in the classroom. At home, this can lead to a discussion on what is the most comfortable to sit in and describing it.

-Using different textures of fabrics, have the students guess what kids of material it is and how it would feel to sit in it.

Here's another activity resource with this book:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/upromise/k_2lessonplan/handout.pdf