The Great Mathemachicken 2 Have a Slice Day, giddy puns for young readers

Puns are an effective and short route to an emerging reader’s heart. Dog Man has been plowing that field for almost a decade and other children’s book series were most certainly doing the same thing prior to that. It’s also quite magical when a child understands a pun for the first time. The Great Mathemachicken 2: Have a Slice Day is an early reader chapter book that’s fun and educational, without being too much of the latter.

It’s obvious that the cover of The Great Mathematchicken 2 has some math intentions. Our titular chicken is riding a scooter while wearing a bow in her hair with tally marks and fractions on it. The wheel of her scooter is acting like a pizza cutter as she’s just ridden over a pizza, cutting it in half and leaving mushrooms and other toppings flying up in her wake. The first chapter is entitled ‘He’s Not a Hog, He’s a Chicken’ and the first lines in that chapter are “Eggs-cuse me…..”.  That line might remind some adult readers of a popular stand-up comedian with a faux arrow going through his head, but in this case, let’s remind everyone that chickens are the subject de jour.

The font in this early chapter book is large. There are illustrations on almost every page and it’s an emerging reader book that got the memo on how to capture and hold the attention of ages five through eight. As the front cover of the book is implying, the chicken at the center of it all is talented in math. That chicken is Chirpy, and everything is going well in the coop until one of the bigger birds gets greedy for the food. Squawky is guarding the food, eating too much, and not allowing other chicks to get some grub. The chickens know that Chirpy is the great Mathemachicken, so they ask her for some assistance.

She’s good with figures, not with larger chicks who are physically more dominant, so she burrows under the fence for some alone time. Chirpy finds some ducks and quickly sees that one of them is her kindred spirit. The two farm animals venture to a local elementary school where they see some kids about to have a math lesson. The teacher is going over tally marks, how they’re counted, what they mean, and the fact that they’re different for some countries.

This leads to pizza time, where the class is figuring out how to divide a pizza. The teacher shows the class that if you cut the pizza into eight equal pieces then it’s been cut up into eighths. If four of those pieces have mushrooms, and the other four only have cheese, then half of the pizza slices are cheese only.  Chripy and Quackers, his new duck friend, watch on enviously as they want some pizza too, but have to get back to their places so that they can share these facts.

Back at the coop, Chirpy tries telling the rest of the group about her experience with fractions and how it could solve the food issue. The group tries to talk some sense into the physically dominant Clucky, who is insistent that he eats as much as he can because he gets to the food first. Can Chirpy and the lesson fractions save the day?

Have a Slice Day is a very charming book. Its math lesson is not intimidating and any adverse thoughts that early elementary kids have about the subject will be put at ease by the cuteness of the drawings and the character’s kind nature. It is a book that will have to be read to the youngest ages once or twice in order for them to be comfortable reading it solo. The vocabulary is on par for those second-grade students to be able to read it by themselves. That is also an age that would benefit from the earlier-than-expected fraction introduction. Most kids won’t encounter fractions until fourth grade, so if you can get them warmed up to the idea a couple of years before then that’ll do nothing but help them in their math journey.

I do wish that the first chapter was a little bit shorter. At nine pages long it’ll be a stretch to have kids gamely read it by themselves if they’re on the younger age of the book’s spectrum. There are a couple of illustrated pages in that count, but with that age, it’s important to keep things simpler and not risk freaking them out with a number of pages that they perceive as too many. In reality, it’s not, but you don’t want kids to think that. So if they put up a wall, it’ll be an easy push to get them to embrace two or three more pages so that they can dig into the big-kid book experience.

The Great Mathemachicken: Have a Slice Day is by New York Times Bestselling Author Nancy Krulik with illustrations by Charlie Alder and is available on Pixel and Ink Books.

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