Title: Lemonade for Sale

Author: Stuart J. Murphy

Illustrator: Tricia Tusa

Recommended Grade Level: 2 and up

Common Core Mathematics Standards Addressed: Relate addition and subtraction to length.
Represent and interpret data.

2.MD.10. Draw a picture graph and a bar graph (with single-unit scale) to represent a data set with up to four categories. Solve simple put-together, take-apart, and compare problems1 using information presented in a bar graph.

Summary: This story is about the Elm Street Kids Club whose clubhouse was falling apart. They had no money to fix their clubhouse and decided to raise money by selling lemonade. They decided to graph their earnings on a daily basis. They realized that their sales had gone down and decided to find out why. They found out that there was a juggler at the end of the block that was causing them to have less customers. They decided to work with the juggler to increase their sales.

Rating: ***** I highly recommend this book. Not only does it gives students ideas for graphing information it also has an entrepreneurial spirit that can't be ignored. It also makes students think about cause and effect. The children saw a dip in sales and decided to investigate why. The members of my book club enjoyed those aspects of the book and thought that it you could do many classroom activities based on the book.

Classroom Ideas: The story in this book lends itself to many classroom activities that can be done with younger children as well as older ones. For younger children, you could have them graph how many times they go to the park and for a little higher order thinking have them see if the number of times they went to the park has any relationship with their behavior. They can also see the relationship between more and less, adding and subtracting. For older children, you can use the story in the book to determine profit. You could give them a problem with the cost of ingredients and what would need to be charged to make a profit. You could also have them determine profit over time. Kelly also recommended the web game Lemonade Stand for students http://www.lemonadegame.com/. This game has the same premise of the story with more details. You must buy the product, determine pricing and have to deal with cause and effect of the weather. This can be a game used during computer time.