Groton - Rather than stick to having volunteers read Dr. Seuss books to children for "Read Across America Day," Groton Public Schools this year added a mathematician to the tradition.

Sort of.

Called "Pocket Day" after the 1974 Dr. Seuss book "There's a Wocket in My Pocket," students in every grade counted the pockets they wore to school on Tuesday, the day after Dr. Suess' birthday. Students then added up the pockets in their class and punched the totals into a Google document that could be viewed districtwide.

Teachers then used this tangible item - pockets - to teach mathematical concepts.

First-grade teacher Jo-Ann Shettles taught grouping and counting by tens. "What do you notice about this five, plus five, plus five?" she asked the children.

Lisa Gunderman, a sixth-grade math teacher dressed as "Thing 2" at West Side Middle School, asked her students to determine mean, median, mode and range based on classroom pocket data.

Robert E. Fitch High School math teacher Matthew Brown gave his Algebra 1 students data in different forms to create 12 different problems and teach "slope" and "y intercept."

"The buy-in is so much greater when you can relate it to real-world concepts," Brown said, explaining it's not as meaningful when students simply solve problems printed in a textbook.

Assistant Superintendent Susan Austin suggested "Pocket Day" as part of the school's Read Across America celebration called "one district, one book, one problem." She chose the story "There's a Wocket in My Pocket" - about a boy who finds creatures in his house like a "Jertain in the curtain" - because almost everyone has pockets on their clothes and it's a tangible item even young children can count.

Counting pockets led to deeper discussions at higher grades: If Groton has 4,521 students, what's a good estimate for the total number of pockets? Boys wear cargo pants with extra pockets, but some girls wear dresses and tights and have no pockets.

Michael Emery, Groton's director of teaching and learning, talked to a group of sixth-grade students about why median (or the middle number in a set of figures) may be a better figure to use than mean (or average).

He told the students, "Suppose in Groton that every single person in Groton, their income was $50,000 a year. But you had this one guy and his income was $3 billion? What would that do to the mean?"

Students knew this would make the mean go up.

"So maybe now it looks like everyone makes $80,000 a year," Emery said.

Denise Ide, a parent volunteer at Northeast Academy, said her three daughters debated what to wear. Ide helped coordinate Read Across America and Pocket Day at the school.

"They changed their outfits," she said. "They wanted to have pockets to contribute to the count."

d.straszheim@theday.com

Twitter: @DStraszheim