about the book
It is hard when your two very best friends in the world hate the thing you love most. Annika Riz loves math. Not surprising; her dad is a high school math teacher, her mother is an accountant, and the family pet, a dog named Prime, is learning to count! But Annika’s friends think math is boring! Izzy would much rather run, and Kelsey would bury her nose in a book 24/7 if she could.
In Mrs. Molina’s third grade class, while Annika can’t wait for the day’s math lesson, her friends are distracted. To help, Annika whispers answers to the math questions to Izzy and Kelsey. If she could just show them how cool math is, maybe they would get excited about math and they could do all sorts of neat math stuff together. Like the city-wide Sudoku tournament at the library. Now that is way cool!
Winning the contest would impress everyone, but Simon, her classmate and nemesis, has also entered. Though Annika may be a whiz at math, Simon is a whiz at everything! Besides, her whole class is distracted by the big PTO fundraiser, the Carnival, this Saturday. There will even be a tank where people can buy tickets to dunk the Principal and each class gets a booth. The third graders are selling homemade cookies. Kelsey and Izzy have already signed up for chocolate chip.
But when the girls try their hand at baking, their lack of fraction fundamentals produce cookies that are uneatable! They decide selling lemonade would be a far better money maker. But on Saturday, the lemonade is a disaster, too. They are losing money on each glass they sell!
Annika realizes all the help she given her friends has really kept them from learning important math skills. To save the day, Annika jumps in, but it is Mrs. Molina who demonstrates that there are all sorts of different ways to contribute.
about the author
Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey, Claudia Mills always wanted to be a writer. By the time she was sixteen, she had written hundreds of poems and sonnets, and a hundred-page autobiography!
Claudia earned a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley, a master’s from Princeton, a master’s in library science focusing on children’s literature from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton. At one point Claudia left grad school mid-year to take a secretarial job at a publishing house.
Claudia wrote and submitted manuscripts under a fake name just to see what happened to them. Twice she had to write rejection letters to herself! Then her boss asked her to review a submission and write suggestions for revisions. She tried to be very balanced. And when she got home she opened the letter to her fake name and followed her own advice. That book was published!
Besides writing, Claudia is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and the mother of two boys. The family lives in Boulder with their cat, Snickers. Claudia writes using a felt tip pen on a narrow-ruled pad, lying on the couch. She gets up at five o’clock every morning to write for two hours, and during that time, she gets to be a grade-school kid again!
Sources:
Author website
Author biography: Macmillan Publishers
Also by Claudia Mills:
The Trouble with Babies (Nora Notebooks, Book 2). Knopf Books for Young Readers. 2016.
Cody Harmon, King of Pets (Franklin School Friends, Book 5). Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2016.
The Trouble with Ants (Nora Notebooks, Book 1). Knopf Books for Young Readers. 2015.
Izzy Barr, Running Star (Franklin School Friends, Book 3). Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2015.
Kelsey Green, Reading Queen (Franklin School Friends, Book 1). Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2013.
Fractions = Trouble! Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2011.
How Oliver Olson Changed the World. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2009.
Being Teddy Roosevelt. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2007.
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