How to teach your children that math is fun
(***Also see Cool Math: toys for mathematically-minded adults and kids.)
Children must do drills, in order to get fast enough with basic arithmetic facts. However, the deadly boredom of memorization starts them to thinking that they hate math. While they are being bored at school, how can you awaken their interest in the beauty and fun of mathematics? (Certainly not by adding more work!) What I did was add fun math books to our list of books to read aloud. Some children love math puzzles enough to accept a book of cool math facts; mine, however, require at least a slim plot to hang the information on, to hold their attention and make them wonder what happens next. Reading aloud was necessary for us; it makes it more fun to marvel over the discoveries together, and what seems dry to a child reading alone is much more exciting read by an adult. We can read aloud books that would be too difficult for reading alone for many years in the future. We also acquired nearly every good geometrical building toy. These are my kids' favorite toys, because there are so many ways you can play with them.- Times Tables the Fun Way: Book for Kids: A Picture Method of Learning the Multiplication Facts
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First, here's some help for those boring drills. Times Tables the Fun Way
gives a little easy-to-remember cartoon-illustrated
story that links each problem (e.g., six X six) with
some sort of pun for the solution (e.g, thirsty sixes = thirty six). Great
for those who remember stories more easily than math facts, or anyone who has
just a few facts that they just can't seem to remember. There is a similar
book, Addition
the Fun Way, for younger students, and the publishers also supply
workbooks, flash cards, etc., though we bought only the books themselves.
Help for School
Toys
The best toys teach without seeming to teach, absorbing attention just because they are so much fun. These are our favorites.
Zome is the most versatile of all building systems, allowing the construction of
organic molecules as well as geometric solids. I believe the best place to buy
Zome is from ZomeTools, as you can buy
many different sizes of kits (hint: buy twice as much as you think you
could possibly want!) and even custom sets of just the parts you need for
a special project. Another good source is Construction Toys. For a small starter set,
you can order from Amazon, with the link below, if you prefer.
Zome is the ideal toy for both children and adults. Scientists use it for
serious models, but the design of Zome is such that you can be just doodling along,
connecting parts together, and find that you have designed something beautiful,
almost in spite of yourself!
Construction Toys carries the beautiful
Geofix building set pieces. Nothing else can give as intuitive an understanding of
the nature of three dimensional shapes! The translucent jewel-tone plastic
triangles, squares, pentagons, and hexagons fit together to form all of the
Platonic solids, Archimedean solids, Johnson solids, prisms, and anti-prisms.
The program Poly, below, gives explicit instructions in how to build these
shapes, or you can build grand castles and free-form constructions.
Wonderful for adults as well as children. A child as young as age
five with good hand-eye coordination will enjoy this (tetrahedrons are
widely felt to make fine space capsules); for those with
less developed hand-eye coordination, you might want to wait a couple
more years. There is no upper age limit; Geofix is great for adults who
like this sort of thing.
Poly is a reasonably priced program, for both Mac and Windows,
which shows the different types of
geometric solids - the five Platonic solids, the Archimedean solids, Prisms and
Antiprisms, and so forth - names them, allows you to turn them in space or flatten them
out to the shape you would put together in order to build one. It even lets you choose
between solid sides and sides made of Geofix building pieces! This is a marvelous program,
well worth the registration fee, but you can download it yourself for free to see
whether you, too, agree. Poly is provided by Pedagoguery Software in British Columbia.
One (adult) friend of ours spent many hundreds of dollars on a huge quantity of
Geomag from Construction Toys, because
the strong magnetic bars and steel balls are so satisfying and beautiful to build with.
All of our young friends, age four and up, have received smaller sets from us for presents. I like
to keep a stock of the small $10 sets on hand for unexpected birthday parties.
There's no risk, because even someone who already has a set needs more. Decide
for yourself whether Geomag or Roger's Connection (a similar concept, with
longer, slimmer bars, available from Construction Toys, among others) provide a better value
for your own purposes. (WARNING: teach children to keep magnets away from TV screens,
video and audio tapes, and memory cards!)
Books
It's best to read these books aloud with your child. They are much more fun that way.preschool through first grade
This short picture book demonstrates counting by twos, fives, and tens, with a silly king and
a clever princess as the main characters. Notes for parents on teaching the concepts are
included at the end.
This book is great, for a child who needs to learn that 100
= 2 x 50 = 4 x 25 = 5 x 20 = 10 x 10. It's also very
amusing, with clever pictures, so a child who already knows
these facts can also enjoy paying attention.
(Unfortunately, another book by the same team, A Remainder
of One, is flawed by having vocabulary is far more
advanced than the arithemtic.)
I feel a little too much sympathy for the woman in the story
whose carefully-made plans get all messed up to really
enjoy this book myself, but that's part of how good
it is. It's about how much shorter the total perimeter of
a bunch of tables is if they are pushed together than if
they are spread out separately. My kindergartener loves it. Lots of
clever details to encourage many re-readings.
This is a minor book, certainly worth reading, about what a
difference it makes if you use a small person's foot instead
of the king's big foot to measure.
kindergarten and early elementary
Alice in Numberland (I Love Math/Fantasy Math)
This is a book for young children, kindergarten to perhaps
second grade. My six year old loves it. He makes me read it
again and again and again.... Of course, he knows the
answers to all the puzzles by now! (My ten-year-old son
enjoyed reading it to himself, once.) The puzzles involves addition,
subtraction, place values, two and three-dimensional shapes,
and simple fractions, among others, with notes for
parents. We borrowed our copy from our local public library.
This is great. "I'm Amanda Bean, and I count anything and
everything!" It's about why one might want to learn
multiplication facts by heart, instead of just adding. A
lesson my older son could have used at a certain point, I remember -
he was good enough at adding that he didn't quite see the point to
memorizing all those multiplication facts. Another nice
point is how the main character's obsessive behavior seems cool.
It's very funny, too, and has a good rhythm for reading aloud. 
This is the best introduction I've seen to polygons, from triangle though quadrilateral, pentagon, on up to decagon. The charming story gives many examples of each shape (though the six-sided one) in real life. I don't mind reading it again and again, which is very important in books for this age group.
fourth grade and up (many even for adults)
This is the book that started this whole project. A boy who thinks he hates math,
thanks to the dull things he must learn in school, is visited nightly, in his dreams,
by a being that tells him all about many fascinating facets of mathematics.
Utterly absorbing - the only problem was in stopping in time for bedtime each night.
For the first time, my nine-year-old son realized that learning the multiplication tables
was not all there was to math. He went from somewhat disliking math to loving it.
'Math Trek' is amusing, though less gripping than 'Number Devil'; it covers a
different range. Great to read aloud.
'Math Trek II' is even better than 'Math Trek' - but read 'Math Trek' before 'Math Trek II'.
This short but pretty book illustrates the concept of
factorial, with the final number being 10 factorial. My
kindergartener loves it, it's good for my fifth-grader, too,
and for much older students as well - anyone who is ready
for an introduction to the concept of factorial numbers. I
think it's pretty remarkable when one book is good for such
a wide range of ages.
This one is very different from the others, but still one of the best. The medieval
Islamic culture is a plus.
'Penrose' is a little more suited to classrooms, with shorter bites of
information, and not as exciting or as deep as the others, but it's good all the same.
Not all alphabet books are for little kids! The entry on 'x' sparked enthusiasm
for algebra in my nine-year-old. Very fun, from beginning to end.
There's not a lot of algebra here, but it gives a strong grounding in the order
of precedence in solving problems. More than that, it includes a smattering
of chemistry. It was actually written by a child, but my own child enjoyed it immensely,
even where it seemed a bit thin to me.
This book is a classic, and well-deserved at that. It is far better suited to
children than the famous "Flatland", which turned out to be more Victorian
satire, against sexism and the like, than a math book at all. The Phantom Tollbooth
contains math and logic, as well as quite a few things that are neither but still
contain a lot of thought-provoking fun.
We got this from the library, and enjoyed it, but it was a very quick read, like the books for the younger kids,
not a major find like the previous and next books in this list.
Many adults succumb to con games when a little knowledge of math and logic could
save them. How wonderful to innoculate a child against that sort of stupidity!
It covers many aspects of math that I'd never gotten straight myself before,
even when I was a math major in college. This book is fun to read, because
it is couched in the form of Sherlock
Holmes stories. Sherlock Holmes purists may cringe, but I
found the anachronisms few and easy to take, and we both
enjoyed this one tremendously.
Many books in this series are in the form of fantasy novels; many are not. Be careful
to get only the former, if your purpose is to explore math in a fun way!
The latter are more suited for adults who need help with college courses. This one,
however, is a fantasy novel, and it's the current book on
our reading list. I was so excited to find it! It's really great so far, for my
ten-year-old. The story shows *why* we really want to learn these things!