Searching for the wonder and joy of mathematics in books (this site will officially move to fairymathmother.com and will be no longer be active after May 25, 2023))
Here's the first line of post about Alice Aspinall's book Everyone Can Learn Math writer by Julie Homenuik: "In the world of math, nothing matters more than how we’ve been taught to feel about math." I have such strong feelings about this sentence that I was unable to contain them in a short introduction to Julie's post. So this POST 1 is a LONG introduction to her post which I will share next Monday as Part 2.
With her new Netflix special premiering in the resolution filled frenzy of January, Marie Kondo and her Life Changing Magic of Tidying up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is everywhere. For those unfamiliar, one main piece of Kondo advice is too collect ALL of a particular item in your home (e.g, all clothes, all books, all papers),... Continue Reading →
In this post, we share two more magical books that ask this same question: Is one always one? The 1st book, More than One, was written by Miriam Schlein and illustrated by Donald Crews. The 2nd book about one is Only One written by Marc Harshman and illustrated Barbara Garrison.
In this post, we share another magical math homework help book that really puts out the welcome mat for anyone entering the world of Common Core Math. Even though the Common Core standards were released in 2010, for parents with young children, this may be your first encounter with the standards. So step in parents and teachers. Don’t be afraid. Even though this book has Common Core stamped on the cover, I promise you will find no horror when you flip the page.
It's back to school, and for many parents that means back to helping their child/ren with math homework. This post features two books parents can add to their back-to-school supply list to help with helping their child/ren with their math homework.
Over the next year, in addition to sharing new magical math books, I'd also like to revisit some of our older posts in an effort to clarify this definition by compiling and sharing a list of magical math book ingredients. There were books we read where the authors were clearly interested in what we, the readers, thought. In fact they prompted us to join in. These books had the first magical ingredient: invitation. These books extended authentic invitations for us to join the conversation, to share, create, and explore mathematical ideas, to co-construct a mathematical story.
Socks are like Pants, Cats are like Dogs was written by Gordon Hamilton and Malke Rosenfeld and published in 2016 by Delta Stream Media, an imprint of Natural Math. What I find refreshing about this book is the amount of noticing it affords. Children are invited to notice connections, similarity and differences throughout all the activities.
I never would have guessed 15 years ago that I would STILL be learning about counting. But listening to children engage with simple prompts and carefully crafted images like in How Many? shows me there are deeper truths and things to be understood about counting and all K-12 mathematics learning. Thank you Christopher Danielson once again for providing a resource to wander and wonder with.
The magic here is that the positive feeling the book gives the students carries over into our inquiries about how to make up the different numbers in other ways, even when we move away from the animals to representing them, with Cuisenaire rods or written equations. Seeing different ways of representing numbers is an important part of our learning, but the book allowed us to visit this again without it seeming like ‘more of the same’: we were not dealing with raw numbers, but with feet on sand.
Amazing Visual Math is a pop-up book that encourages children to interact with mathematical concepts through folding, unfolding, flipping, and tab-pulling. The book is a mathematical reference book that explores different concepts from the first years of school (K-2). The sixteen colorful pages are full of different mathematical representations children can manipulate. There are mathematical facts and questions on each spread.
Math Book Magic 