Children’s author Mandy Monath will read from her new book, “How Counting Came to Be,” at the Wilson County Public Library on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. Children will also make pumpkins and learn hands-on cooking skills with Charlie Cart.
Monath’s book is about a cave girl named Ugh Poppi, whose name means “girl who thinks too much.” She goes on a quest to find ever-useful pumpkins for her large family – “a pumpkin for every Ugh.” She doesn’t know exactly how many pumpkins she needs. She doesn’t even know how many people are in her family, because in the caveman era, no one could count.
When Ugh Poppi finally arrives at the pumpkin patch and meets a helpful stranger, they discover something really important – the concept of numbers.
“It’s the greatest idea in mathematics,” says Radmila Sazdanovic, a mathematics professor at North Carolina State University. “This book not only imagines the invention of an idea that changed human life forever, but also teaches a collaborative and positive approach to solving mathematical problems.”
Join Monath and the library staff for this fun story about how people first learned to answer the question “How many?” and a hands-on experience of how pumpkins and their relatives, gourds, have been used as tools and food for thousands of years.
This event is free and open to the public.
