Swimmy

Swimmy, by Leo Lionni, became a favorite book of mine during student teaching. Being in fourth grade, I didn't get the opportunity to use many picture books, but this book was used in the beginning of the year to promote teamwork and creative problem-solving within the class.

For those who are unfamiliar with the book, Swimmy is a little black fish who lives in a school of red fish. One day, a tuna fish comes and eats all of the fish in his school, except Swimmy. Swimmy continues on to explore the ocean and meets various sea animals when he finally stumbles upon a school of little fish, just like himself. He joins this school and encourages them to travel out and see more things in the ocean. The other fish are convinced that they cannot do this because they will get eaten by a bigger fish. Swimmy teaches them how to swim together in a group, shaped like a big fish, so that when they venture out all the big sea creatures think that it is a big fish and not just a school of small fish. Swimmy is successful and the school of fish venture out to explore the ocean.

This book also provides a great opportunity to create word problems. Although it never specifically mentions numbers, variables could be assigned to stand for the "unknown" numbers to create word problems. For example, in the beginning of the book all of the fish in Swimmy's school are eaten except for Swimmy. So, an appropriate word problem could be:

There are 900 fish in Swimmy's school. A giant tuna fish comes along and eats all of the fish except for Swimmy. How many fish did the tuna fish eat?

Students would then have to solve 900-1= 899. If algebraic thinking was going to be explored, then you could model for students how to set up and solve an equation like 900 - x = 1. (Where x= the number of fish eaten by the tuna.)

For younger grades, students could each make their own fish to become a "school" of fish as a class. The teacher's fish could act as Swimmy and problems could be created accordingly.

Some extension activities I found online are mainly creating similar illustrations to ones found in the story and literacy activities, but they can be found on these sites if you're interested: http://www.kinderart.com/across/swimmy.shtml

I'm finally starting to see all of the possibilities out there for incorporating literature and creative activities into mathematics. If students were able to visualize and really visualize the problems through literature, mathematics would come alive and be much more enjoyable for them. As a teacher, I want all of my students to love mathematics as much as I do!