Book Descriptions

LEMONADE FOR SALE Level 3 Books Homepage

Lemonade for Sale Thumb

Skills

  • Featured Skills
  • BAR GRAPHS

NCTM Standards

  • Communication
  • Data Analysis & Probability
  • Reasoning and Proof
  • What's a Standard?

Where to Buy

When members of the Elm Street Kids' Club decide to sell lemonade to raise money to fix up their clubhouse, they do it in style. Dressed in special "lemon hats," with Petey the Parrot, the club mascot squawking, "Lemonade for Sale!," business booms at first. Sheri keeps track on a bar graph, plotting the number of cups sold against the days of the week. But suddenly sales drop when Jed the Juggler comes to town. What will the Elm Street kids do? Gathering, charting and comparing data is an important skill for assessing progress and making predictions. Illustrated by Tricia Tusa.

ActivitiesView Activities Homepage

Read the story with your child or class and describe what is going on in each picture. Talk about the graphs that accompany the story. Ask questions such as: "On which day were more cups sold, Monday or Tuesday?" and "How many cups were sold on Wednesday?"

Make graphs of things in the real world—children playing at the park, dogs that walk past your house, cars parked on the street, etc.—by counting them each day for a week. Do more children play at the park on the Monday or Saturday? How many cars are parked on the street on Tuesday morning? How many on Sunday morning? Does the number go up or down from day to day?

Set up your own lemonade stand with a group of friends and create a graph to keep track of the sales. On which day did you sell the most? The least? Show when sales were going up or down.

Lemonade for Sale PDF Activity Page

ReviewsView Reviews Homepage

FROM KIRKUS REVIEWS

This lively entry in the MathStart series introduces elementary bar graphing, plus some rudiments of marketing, as the members of the Elm Street Kids Club refill their depleted piggybank by opening a lemonade stand. Their graph reflects steadily rising sales—until Thursday, when traffic suddenly slows to a trickle, diverted by Jed, a new juggler working the comer. When the children invite Jed to work next to their stand on Friday, sales rocket off the chart. In vigorously drawn watercolors, Tusa adds loads of funny detail, from the club members' lemon-shaped headgear and assorted customers to the squads of lemons partying across the endpapers. A winning way to make some basic concepts and techniques less intimidating. Starred review.

Used with permission from Kirkus Reviews. Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

The young members of the Elm Street Kids' Club are depressed. Their clubhouse is falling apart and their piggy banks are almost empty. What to do? Matthew suggests a lemonade stand. Everyone pitches in to help. Sheri makes a bar graph so that the club can track how their sales can bring them closer to their financial goal. How the club resolves a threatening setback provides a surprising twist to the story. Lemonade for Sale is another installment in the "MathStart" program, designed to teach math concepts in an appealing storybook format. Tusa's quirky watercolor and ink illustrations inspire smiles and chuckles. Activity suggestions directed at both children and adults extend the range of the story beyond a simple reading.

—Wendy Keen
Used with permission from Children's Literature Comprehensive Database, www.childrenslit.com


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