Do you like to draw? If you’re great at it, you can get paid to draw as your job! Look at Jim Paillot, who draws the pictures or “illustrations” in the Bedtime Math books. He gets to draw all day. He has drawn not only our books, but also dozens of My Weird School books as well as others. By the way, some drawings are more work than others. Spot art of just one animal or person, like the girl here from Bedtime Math 2, doesn’t take long to draw. Full page “illos” have to fill the whole page with color and scenery and more, so one of those could take hours. When you add up all those books and all those pages, you see that drawing is not just great play, but hard work, too.
Wee ones: How many fat wheels can you count on Jim’s skater girl’s skateboard?
Little kids: How many hearts can you count on skater girl’s pajama pants? Count one leg or the other, or both together! Bonus: If on another page Jim drew 3 dogs on one page and twice as many dogs on the facing page, how many dogs did he draw?
Big kids: If it takes Jim 20 minutes to draw each spot art in a My Weird School book, and each book has 9 spots, how long does it take him to draw those spots? Bonus: The My Weird School 21-book box set has, you guessed it, 21 books. How long did it take Jim to draw all the spot art in those? (Hint: as a shortcut, you might want to convert to hours first! An hour has 60 minutes).
Answers:
Wee ones: 4 wheels.
Little kids: She has 7 hearts on her right leg (which is on our left) and 9 on her other leg, making 16 total. Bonus: 9 dogs, since there are 3 on one page and 6 on the other.
Big kids: 180 minutes. Bonus: 180 minutes is 3 hours, so 63 hours for all those books — and that’s not counting the covers!
Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking before she could walk, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.