Pizza Counting

These pizzas have all the right ingredients. Pepperoni, cheese, and onions make a purr-fect pizza cat. Is it time for a clock pizza made of sausages and peppers? Count the toppings on these pizza masterpieces, then divide them up into filling fractions. Zesty pizza facts add to the flavorful fun. "...this takes some basic mathematical concepts and illustrates them winningly-in this case, with pizza. The crust (with cheese and tomato sauce) represents a big, fat zero. Toppings, which illustrate numbers from 1 to 20, make things more interesting; combinations not only produce pictures (clocks, maps, flags) on the pizza but also illustrate a little addition, multiplication, and so on. Thirteen onion strips, 14 chives, 15 pepperoni slices, and 16 basil leaves makes a pretty impressive cat face, and by the time children get to 100 pieces of topping (mushrooms, peppers, olives, etc.), they'll have learned that Americans eat more than enough pizza every year to make a crust-to-crust path to the moon. The computer-manipulated pizzas are masterworks of food art and may inspire not only counting and fractions but also some cheese and pepperoni decoupage. -- Booklist

Christina Dobson lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband and two children (all pizza lovers). She is a graduate of Harvard University and earned an M.Ed. at the University of Michigan. She has taught high school Russian and Social Studies. Now Christina coordinates a family literacy program and assists with a mentoring program for teenage girls.