Chrysanthemum

Chrysanthemum, a book by Kevin Henkes, can be used in a math lesson. Here are some ideas:

Make a bar graph of the number of letters in the first names of students.

How was your name chosen? Make a pie chart of different reasons (family name, popular name, made up name, etc).

Assign a number value to each alphabet letter and figure out how much your name is worth (what is the relationship between length and value of a name?)

How many of the letters in your name have symmetry? what kind of symmetry?

Probability -- which letter is most often used in first names in our classroom? Which vowel and consonant are most frequently found?

Statistics -- who has the longest name? shortest name? Find the minimum, maximum, mean and mode of length of names.

Find out what a chrysanthemum is -- how many petals? symmetry? height?