Math

Note:

Although these materials may all be used as early as preschool, most are intended for a rather broad age range and can be used well beyond the preschool years. Also see: Homeschoolstories.com Preschool and Math

Learning Wrap-Ups: Basic Math Introductory Kit

Book cover: 'Learning Wrap-Ups: Basic Math Introductory Kit'

These colorful key-shaped plastic flash cards allow students to practice basic Math skills by wrapping a string around the ribbed edges of each card to identify the correct answer. (Cards are attached together on a pivot point in groupings of 10 cards organized by operation.) The cards are cleverly self-correcting – when the child finishes each card, they simply flip it over; when all answers are correct, the string will match the diagram on the back of the card. The basic operations sets are simple equations where you match the equation to the correct answer.

Ask Albert Einstein

Author(s): 
Lynne Barasch
Back flap of book

So maybe your elementary school age child will not learn much Math with this book--the one problem shown involves the Pythagorean theorem and it shows the external tangent line touching two circles--but she may learn a few related things: who is Albert Einstein, why he came to America, where he worked and study, ... and how he actually helped some kids with their Math homework!

Piece = Part = Portion

Author(s): 
Scott Gifford

There are lots of fraction books for kids out there with photos of every conceivable flavor of... Pizza. This book has the fractions, it has pizza, but thankfully it does not stop there! It provides a progression of various portions to a sliced—but intact—pizza representing the whole (1/1 = 1 = 100%). The connections it makes between the fractional part and its decimal and percentage representations is what makes it different, and useful. My kids have had a difficult time making this connection at home, perhaps because their own homeschool teacher suffers from the same ailment?

Math-terpieces

Author(s): 
Greg Tang

Perusing through the Math titles in Picture Books at the library last week I found lots of books. Alas, most of them were, well, boring. Uninteresting. I brought a handful home to investigate and of those I found a few nice volumes including this one!

A Million Dots

Author(s): 
Andrew Clements
Illustrator(s): 
Reed, Mike

There are indeed a million dots in the book, although the book states it would take over eleven days for the reader to actually count them! On each page one of the dot numbers is highlighted and a large illustration depicts what that number represents. For instance, dot number 265,000 represents the number of different kinds of moths and butterflies on earth, and dot number 615,100 represents the number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Fun with Roman Numerals

Author(s): 
David A. Adler
Illustrator(s): 
Edward Miller

I showed this book and read it aloud to my kids in Junior Classical League's last meeting, and except for one kid, the  club's president and a Latin aficionado, none of us knew about the Roman numerals on the two last pages! Have fun learning!

From the publisher: 

Schiller Math

Schiller Math Kit
Author(s): 
Larry Schiller
This is an impressive, complete, scripted, Montessori-based Math program. Though it's not 100% purist Montessori (for example, some of the manipulatives will provide changes in color and shape at the same time, where Montessori was very fussy about only working with one attribute at a time), I think it does a really nice job of incorporating her most critical ideas.

Cuisenaire Rods

When I first researched homeschooling products and resources, I spent quite some time looking at different math manipulatives. For one thing, there are so many, and for another, I love math. I remember wondering whether these colored rods would really be worth purchasing, as they are on the expensive side. And my math education, as far as I could remember, had been accomplished without a single manipulative. Then I found Miquon Math, and immediately liked the concept.

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