CARTA DE TITA BETY PARA MI NIETA EMI

Silva teaches fractions using fruit in this Spanish-language picture book.

Fractions are hard for everyone, but the author, a former professor, demonstrates that learning the basic concepts can be fun, as long as you throw in some rhymes and fresh fruit. Silva offers a low-stakes way for young children to begin understanding how to add and subtract wholes, halves, and quarters. The book provides visual interpretations of these amounts with colorful photos of various fruits and plants native to Mexico and the United States, including limes, pine nuts, chayote, guavas, persimmons, and mamey. García’s photographs of the fruits are crisp, high-definition, and even appetizing against the stark white backgrounds. Each page includes a simple caption (“Uno y uno, dos enteros esos son”), a clear image, and an introductory-level fractional equation, each expressing the same information. There are no people in this book until the very end, where two illustrations by Garcia depict Emi, a girl with light skin and brown hair. The math is largely repetitive, showing different iterations of the same problems, but early readers will benefit from the easy-to-understand visuals. Children who are learning Spanish will learn simple math terms as well as the Spanish names of various fruits that they may have never seen before.

An accessible introduction to one of elementary math’s most challenging concepts.