Sep 13, 2012

Lost in Lexicon: A Great Tool for Teachers

We've been talking a lot lately about Penny Noyce's newest book, The Ice Castle: An Adventure in Music, but we don't want to forget the first book in the Lexicon Adventure series, Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers, which we published in 2011. In fact, Lost in Lexicon is such a great book and tool for teachers to use in the classroom that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics reviewed it this month in their Teaching Children Mathematics magazine. Now the bad news is that you need a subscription to read the entire magazine, but fortunately we've posted the review here for you:



"Two thirteen-year-old cousins travel through an imaginary land called Lexicon, searching for clues to help them locate and return children who have gone missing from their villages. As the cousins, Ivan and Daphne, use a compass and Cartesian plane to make their way across Lexicon, they encounter a village overrun by punctuation, are joined by a four-legged thesaurus, and use mathematical formulas to help repair a town. In their travels, the cousins use words and numbers to gather clues that eventually lead them to the location of the missing children. Here they call on their growing confidence and knowledge of language and mathematics to rescue the children and help them return to villages.
Noyce’s imaginative, playful use of words and numbers keeps readers engaged throughout the story. Most tween and teen students will likely recognize an underlying message about the dangers of mindlessly watching television and playing video games. This book also answers the age-old question asked by students: “When will I ever use this in real life?” The charming story, along with the focus questions and extension activities at the end of the book, make this an entertaining selection for student-led reading discussions at the upper elementary and intermediate level."
—Jennifer Geoffroy, D.C. Public Schools, Washington, D.C.




A big thank you to Jennifer and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for saying such great things about Lost in Lexicon.
And if you're a teacher or educator, we want to know, what do you look for when picking books to use in your classroom?


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