“I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and types of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason, too. ”
The above quote is my favorite statement made in the recently popular children’s novel, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”, written by Brian Selznick. While the book has been around for a little while, the recent success of the feature film based on the text, has transformed this book into an adventure on which many children are excited to embark. When I told the students in my class one day that I had read the book in one morning and loved it, and then proceeded to see the movie and loved the story even more, many of them stated enthusiastically, “Oh…I’ve been wanting to see that movie!” While it saddened me just a little bit that none of my students expressed an interest in reading the book before seeing the film, I took the response from my class and turned it into an opportunity. Since the majority of the students in my class never get the chance to go see a movie in theaters until they make their way out of the “ten dollar” theater and into the High Point dollar theater, I figured I had a little time to introduce my students to the visual and literary genius known as Brian Selznick.
I decided that my purpose, my job in the machine during this time in my students’ lives, was to allow my students to experience all that the book had to offer before any of them had the chance to spoil it by seeing the movie (because we all know that this is often the case with films based upon literature). Almost instantly, I began reading the book to my students during our read aloud time, and it wasn’t long before students started begging me to read further when it was time for us to move onto another subject each day. While it would just be wonderful to take an entire day sometimes to read a book with my class and allow them the opportunity to just dive into the story in every which way possible, with all of the “non-negotiable” mandates that teachers must meet these days, this dream is simply out of the question!
It was then, that I opted to put my integration skills to work…thank you HPU!
Just last week, while we were still not finished reading the entire book, we had made it through Part One of the story and the students were just as intrigued as I was when I had read the book for the very first time. Last week was also the dreaded week that we were slotted to take benchmark tests, and while I personally think that tests like these are “silly”, I knew that some of my students would simply freak out if we didn’t have an opportunity to review before the math benchmark. It was after realizing my students’ love of our read aloud book, and noticing their desire to review the math skills from this quarter, that I devised a plan.
So it was, after making 31 vintage-looking notebooks out of leather-like scrapbook paper and Duct tape, that my students and I traveled back to the time and place where “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” takes place in order to hop on a train that would take us on a marvelous math mystery.
The notebooks, which were meant to remind the students of the notebook that Hugo had inherited from his father in the story, were filled with pages devoted to helping them review what they knew about length, fractions, and geometry. The students had to name various polygons that they saw when looking at sketches of the Eiffel Tower. With illustrations from the actual text, the students were reminded how Hugo stole parts of toys in order to fix his father’s mechanical man, and this made them think about how fractions were parts of a whole. The students were also able to make a connection with Hugo’s character, who used tools in order to fix toys and clocks, as they were using rulers and protractors to measure lengths and angles.
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| These are only a few of the vintage looking notebooks that I made for my class. |
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| Students had to use rulers in order to determine types of triangles. |
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| Students had to use protractors to determine the angle measures of the clock hands. |
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| Students had to find different polygons in the Eiffel Tower. |
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| Students had to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators. |
In the book, Hugo and his partner in crime, Isabelle, sneak into a theater to see this movie. I decided to show it to my students as a hook to the lesson. After having taken benchmark tests for almost 3 straight hours that morning, we all needed to laugh, and this silent film certainly did the trick! Many students were not excited about the fact that the movie had no speaking and it was in black and white, yet they were re-thinking that hesitation by the end! But this was not the only form of multi-media that I used in order to make my students feel as though they were in the story...
In order to make our trip to 1930’s Paris even more authentic, I also had the soundtrack from the movie “Hugo” playing as the students worked in their notebooks. Many of these students may never have the opportunity to travel around the world, outside the state, or even outside of High Point, but I hope that they will forever remember the day that we took a math journey into a book and ended up halfway around the world!
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