If You Were a Minute

The notion of time—that seemingly unidirectional flow of existence and events from past to present to future—is a daunting subject for philosophy professors to teach, so what happens when the target audience is kids? Trisha Speed Shaskan does a fine job of breaking down the notion of time for young children, despite the difficulty of the task. The minute is on display in this nonfiction book from the series “Math Fun.” Shaskan begins with defining it as a unit used to measure time, a period equal to sixty seconds. She continues by asking the reader to pretend to be such a unit, and then to imagine what one can do in one minute. The examples that follow are immediately recognizable and relevant to first graders and older. Wash hands. Sing the alphabet three times. Tie one’s shoes. Once the idea of a minute is established, Shaskan follows up with seconds. If you can do sixty jumping jacks in one minute, that is one jumping jack per second! Next, we encounter clocks, both analog and digital, and we even have to face the alarm clock! At school, schedules with varying amounts of minutes define our day. How long does a math lesson last? What about recess or lunch? Minutes are everywhere, whether we are running track, swimming laps, gauging travel time, or cooking. One fun example is the time needed for ordering a pizza (it arrives in thirty minutes), as opposed to making one’s own (this takes an hour)! Whether it is go-to-sleep time or wake-up time, little ones must grow up fast and time is imposed upon them as it is imposed upon us all. But learning about it in such a playful and delightfully illustrated book makes the bitter pill easier to swallow! A practical aspect is the lastpage where one finds a glossary which includes such terms as analog, digital, hour, minute, and second, as well as an index, a list of related books and websites, and the names of all the books in the “Math Fun” series. Reviewer: Jane Singleton Paul