Lemonade For Sale By Stuart Murphy (Blog Post 3 Tyler Hooper)

Tyler Hooper

1. In Lemonade For Sale, written by Stuart Murphy, the Elm Street Kid's Club members were feeling sad. Their treehouse was falling apart and needed some repairs. Danny, Sheri, Petey, Matthew, and Meg realized they would need to raise money to make the repairs. Danny came up with the clever idea of selling lemonade to the neighborhood. Sheri thought it would be a good idea to keep track of their earning by creating a bar graph. With the number of cups sold along the y-axis and the days of the week on the x-axis. In the beginning of the week the kids were doing great selling up to 40 cups on Tuesday. However, as Wednesday came around the sales started to slow. The Elm Street Kid's Club became nervous they would not make enough to afford the repairs need on the tree house. They realized that down the street someone began juggling, and he was taking away from the business. The kids ran down the street and invite the juggler to start performing next to the Lemonade Stand. This allowed customers to drink some refreshing lemonade while watching the performance. The combined efforts allowed the Elm Street Kid's Club to raise the money for the repairs on their tree house.

2. Lemonade For Sale teaches young children not only a sense of work ethic, but educates children how to keep track of numbers using the bar graph system. For everyday Sheri was able to track how many cups of lemonade were sold, creating an effective way to track the lemonade stands progress. Not only does it teach the use of a graphing system, but also the fundamentals that every input creates an output. The lemonade stands creates an easy example for young children to follow. For everyday of the week there was a specific number of cups sold, and the children can trace this on the bar graph.

3. Literature is an effective way to teach young children important mathematical concepts because it is a visual way of learning. Especially with picture books it engages the children. It is hard to keep a young child's attention and fully explain a math concept, like graphing. But applying it to a lemonade stand, something that every young kid likes to set up during the spring and summer allows the child to imagine themselves doing the activity. Not only imagine, but actually recreate it in the future. It makes math fun when there are different characters within the example.