One Grain of Rice by Demi

 

One Grain of Rice is a great mathematical folktale.  This book is about a raja who kept almost all of the people's rice for himself every year.  When the famine hit, the raja did not share with any of the people- and they went hungry.  A village girl named Rani comes up with a plan.  She does a good deed for the raja and the raja lets her choose her reward.  She asks for only one grain of rice, doubled every day, for thirty days.  As you read in the book, one grain of rice, doubled every day, for thirty days, turns into more than one billion grains of rice.  Rani taught the raja a lesson about what it means to be fair.  

This book could be used to create a linkage from Math to Literacy.  You could read this book with your students have have them actually calculate how much rice they would get after doubling each grain for 30 days.  On the page that the foldout is on in this book, you could talk about division.  Have students discover how many elephants it took to carry the grains of rice!