Grandfather Tang's Story (1990)

“Grandfather Tang’s Story”
By Ann Tompert, illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker
This has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I have decided to get it to use for my math class. This book can also be used for Chinese cultural studies because tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzles and the book is about fox fairies which are a part of Chinese folklore. The plot of this book is Grandfather Tang telling a story to his granddaughter Soo about the Fox Fairies using tangrams to make the shapes of the different animals throughout the book. I give this book five stars and will use it with all of my classes in the future. One activity is to have the children make tangram animals and another activity would be for them to do a story like this one with tangrams to make the animal characters. ( )

When two shape shifters take their competitive nature to far, they learn to bring their friendship to the forefront and work together to save themselves from hunters.
Classroom Use: A perfect compliment to a math lesson about the properties of tanagrams. ( )

Genre: folklore
This is a good example of folklore because it has a grandfather telling his granddaughter stories that have been in the family for generations. He uses tangrams to tell the stories. This book would be great to use when teaching about shapes, following directions and tangrams. ( )

This book is great to use in math when using tangrams or congruent triangles. This story line gives readers a plot to follow as well as cool animals to make with their tangrams throughout the book. Ann Tompert is written about more here http://www.boydsmillspress.com/contributors/contributors/tompert_ann.html. ( )

Little Soo and her grandfather, Tang, were sitting under a tree, when Soo asked to be told a story. Grandfather Tang got out two sets of tan grams and arranged them into the shape of foxes. He began a story of two foxes that could changes shapes. They played a game changing in the shapes of different animals that were hunter or prey and tried to eat each other. One finally turned into the shape of a goose and flew away, they other were sad, realizing he would never see his friend again. He turned himself into a goose and flew after his friends as fast as he could, he caught up and they decided to go home. A hunter shot one of the geese from the sky, to save him they other fox turned into a lion and scared the hunter away. Grandfather Tang told Soo that they were much more careful the next time that they played.

I enjoyed the book and thought that the tan gram pictures were very cool. The use of tan grams in story telling portrays Chinese culture. This would make for a good read aloud, especially if the children could see the tan grams change shape on a projector.

1.) Cut out tan grams and help the children construct animals and other shapes from the tan grams.
2.) Have children write there own story with tan gram characters to go along with the story.