Bean Thirteen

Love this book! Funny and educational. Not enough of this kind of book.

Ralph and Flora are two insects who have gathered twelve beans for dinner. Against Ralph's better judgement, Flora picks a thirteenth bean, which turns out to cause a long sequence of problems. Not only are they unable to divide the beans evenly between the two of them, but there is still one bean left over when they invite over one guest, and then two guests. Inviting a third guest (for a total of five bugs) makes the problem even worse: there are three beans left over. Eventually they find a solution with six bugs, in which the guests take as much food as they need: one takes one bean, three take two beans each, and two take three beans each. We never find out who ends up eating the unlucky thirteenth bean! This is a great story to teach early numeracy skills, and there are plenty of small collections of beans for children to count. The author has done a good job of writing a book about division, remainders and prime numbers that still works as a story.

My 3.5 year old loves this book and so do I. It has great colors and illustrations and the concept of math is integrated so well. It also ends perfectly, no awkward text or lame ending. Highly recommend.

I was reading a funny, entertaining book to my daughters, and would you believe it? By mistake, they learned something about math! The characters are funny and naive. My girls had fun predicting the problems that Ralph and Flora kept getting into, all related to the seemingly simple task of dividing up 13 beans. Very clever and very funny. Nice illustrations, too.