Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci

Title: Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci

Author: Joseph D’Agnese
Publisher: Henry Holt
Publication Date: 2010
Genre/Format: Picture book/Nonfiction/Biography

Summary: Perhaps one of the greatest Western mathematicians of all times, Leonardo Fibonacci was born in Pisa, Italy around 1170. Fibonacci was a whiz at math, in fact; he thought about numbers all of the time that he appeared to be daydreaming.  While on a trip with his father to a city in northern Africa, Fibonacci noticed merchants using a new numeral system borrowed from the Hindi in India, rather than the traditional Roman numerals. As an adult, Leonardo wrote a book about the Hindi-Arabic numbers, but he is most remembered for his number pattern called the Fibonacci sequence, a special numbered pattern that appears in nature.

Personal thoughts: Read Together:   grades K - 12 
Read without help: grades 4 – 12.
Read With:  Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere: A Fibonacci Tale (Ann McCallum, 2007); Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature (Sarah Campbell, 2010);

Snippet of Text: “You can call me Blockhead. Everyone else does. One day when I was just a boy, Maestro wrote out a math problem and gave us ten minutes to solve it. I solved it in two seconds.” (pg.5-6)

“My father took me to live in a city called Bugia in northern Africa. In my new home, I noticed the Arab merchants didn’t use Roman numerals. They used numerals they borrowed from the Hindu people of India. Back home, we wrote this: XVIII. Here, the merchants wrote this: 18. See how much easier it is? I wanted so much to learn about these numerals.” (pg. 21)

Watch the book trailer for Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci

Connections to Reading:  Activating background knowledge, Making connections, Set purposes for reading

Connections to Writing: Expository—Describe how you feel about solving math problems.

Connections to Writing: Narrative—(1) You have just found out Fibonacci has died. You want to honor him by writing an obituary (2) Write an Acrostic Poem

Connections to Art: (1) Draw a picture of all you know about mathematics. (2) Design a bumper sticker about Fibonacci sequence.

Connections to Science: The Fibonacci sequence emerges in nature and found in a variety of flowers and trees, generally associated with some kind of spiral structure.  For example, the leaves on a stem of a flower or a branch of a tree many times grow in a corkscrew, spiraling around the branch as new leaves form further out. Look at plants and flowers that illustrate the Fibonacci sequence: pinecones, pineapples and sunflowers.

Topics Covered: Fibonacci sequence, mathematics, mathematicians, Roman and Hindi-Arabic numbers

Translated to Spanish:  No

Translated to other languages: Japanese

Other formats: DVD (animated); audio