Don’t leave out the math activities for World Book Day! Use these book-themed math lessons to work right across the curriculum.
Math activities for World Book Day
World Book Day is a celebration of books, stories, and reading that takes place each year in March.
In 2025 World Book Day will be on Thursday 6th March. Many home-educating groups, schools, and early years settings celebrate with book-themed events and invite their children (& parents / staff!) to dress up as their favourite book character.
Save time with our ready-made World Book Day teaching unit
For the best World Book Day lesson ideas, save time and get our ready-made World Book Day teaching unit from our Play Academy. You’ll get:
- a ready-made World Book Day thematic unit
- bonus printables to make your teaching even easier
- a guide to building a book nook
- a story writing lesson plans with free story spinner printables
- a non-fiction writing lesson plan
- a story ‘small world’ lesson plan
- a book-themed Guess Who? activity
- book-themed math activities
- a bookmark craft activity with color-in bookmark printables
- a set of book club discussion questions that you can use to talk about any book
- a Goldilocks storytelling kit
- plus over 300 more individual lesson plans in 50 ready-made teaching units so you can easily teach an engaging and successful program that includes math, literacy, science, art, and more, all year round, year after year. Everything is planned for you and easy to find, saving you so much time.
Download your World Book Day Unit here
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You can have lots of fun theming a whole day, or a whole week of activities around books – and don’t leave out the math lessons!
You can use these ideas fun math ideas for World Book Day to share the love of reading right across the curriculum.
Through these activities, children can:
:: survey opinions on reading habits, likes and dislikes :
: use Venn diagrams to display information
:: use a tally chart to display information
:: take part in a math quiz about books
:: have fun playing with numbers
Book-themed math activity: Venn diagrams
A Venn diagram is a visual way to show how two or more groups of things relate to each other.
They let us clearly see how two or more sets compare and contrast with one another.
There are many questions you can ask your children to compare their likes and dislikes about books.
Stick up a variety of questions around the room, or have a different question each day of book week, and invite your children to sign up in the correct place on the Venn diagram to match their preferences.
Try some of these questions:
:: do you like this fictional character or this one?
:: do you like to read in bed or on the sofa?
:: do you like fiction or non-fiction?
:: do you like graphic novels or poems?
:: do you like this author or this author?
You can find a further Venn diagram lesson with free printable here.
Book-themed math activity: tally charts
A tally chart is a quick and simple way to note down information, where we skip count in fives to quickly add up the figures. Your children can work in pairs to survey the whole class, recording their findings on a tally chart.
Have them think up their own question or use these ideas:
:: do you like reading: yes, no, sometimes?
:: have you read these books: option one, option two, option three?
:: have you read anything by these authors?
:: do you read on your own, with your mum or with your dad?
:: do you like to read comics, poems, chapter books and non-fiction?
Extend the activity by converting the tally chart-gathered information in a bar graph.
And here’s a great tally chart lesson linked to the story of The Gingerbread man.
Book-themed math activity: Book Number Quiz
Host a book quiz all about numbers.
Grab a book, any book, and have fun with a rapid fire round of questions all based on math.
Try these questions to get you started:
:: how many pages are in your book?
:: what’s the fourth word on the sixth page?
:: what’s the last word in your book?
:: what’s the first word in your book?
:: how many words are there in the first sentence of your book?
:: how many chapters are in your book?
:: what year was your book published?
:: how many years before / after your were born was the book published?
:: what’s ten more than the number of pages in your book?
:: what’s three less than the number of words on the first page?
:: estimate how many words there are in the whole book? (number of words on a line x number of lines on a page x pages in your book)
Storybooks about circles
There are many brilliant books with math themes. Host a story time with these books about circles
Save time and get your ready-made World Book Day unit!
Yes, you can do all the planning yourself if you want to, or you can head straight to our Play Academy and download our ready-made World Book Day unit. That sounds like a better idea!
You’ll get a set of lesson plans all based on books: fiction writing, non-fiction writing, making book nooks, book-themed math activities and arts and crafts. Plus you’ll get fun printables to make your teaching even easier.
Come and join the Play Academy to get this and over 50 more ready-made teaching units, so you can easily teach an engaging and successful program that includes math, literacy, science, art, and more, all year round, year after year.
See more and download your first unit here.
