HAVE A SLICE DAY

Chirpy the chick stows away on the school bus with a new feathered friend to learn about pizza…and, oh yes, arithmetic.

Though she avoids the attention of the racially diverse (and surprisingly oblivious) class, Chirpy sees addition, counting tally marks by groups, and fractions demonstrated before the children race out to recess, leaving 10 delectable pizza scraps for her to divide with her relentlessly curious companion Quackers the duckling. Some of that arithmetic comes in handy later when Chirpy heroically faces down Clucky, a bully who has been hogging the feeder, to show her awed fellow chicks how to divide the feed into equal piles so that everyone gets a fair share. Krulik loads her 10 easily digestible chapters with puns and jokes as well as nuggets of learning and caps the episode with a recipe for pizza muffins. Alder’s illustrations, monochrome with yellow highlights, feature a table showing different styles of tally marks commonly used in various parts of the world as well as images of cute chicks (and duckies). Chirpy is distinguished from the other nestlings by her rallying cry—“Chirp chirp cha-ree!”—and the bow on her head decorated in mathematical symbols.

STEM-ware, barnyard style, with a bit of math-odical problem-solving.