Math

My son is sick and sleeping on my lap (all 4.5 years and 40 lbs of him - ooof!) so I have the time to update :-D See? A silver lining in every cloud.

Math seems to be a big part of my life lately. My daughter is getting into it and so of course, the rest of us are too. She's not sitting down and reading textbooks or doing worksheets, but she's just randomly doing math lately. Figuring out allowance (that never seems to get old!), writing multiplication problems on the walls of her bedroom, stuff like that. She's making it fun and teaching me that it's not such an awful thing after all.

We've been reading a lot of math story books lately. I really like the MathStart series. Bridget's favorite is Dave's Down-to-Earth Rock Shop. It's got a lot of info on rocks too, sort of like the original Magic School Bus books with little reports on the side. Owen's favorites are The Sundae Scoop and Just Enough Carrots. Bridget loved the carrot one when she was little too :-D Even though it's aimed at little kids she still likes it enough that she sat and listened when I read it to Owen. For some reason, that's a book I can read over and over again without going up a wall. I especially love the look on the little bunny's face when he's pleading with his mom to buy fewer peanuts.

Moving away from the MathStart series, both of them like The Greedy Triangle but Owen doesn't like Sir Cumference and the First Round Table. I like it though. It's helped *me* remember circumference, diameter and radius (don't look at me like that! Didn't I mention that math isn't my thing?).

The Grapes of Math is a fun one too. It's not a story book, but pages of word/picture problems.

From the library we took out 2 x 2 = BOO! : A Set of Spooky Multiplication Stories. I took it out on a whim, not sure which of the kids it would appeal to. I haven't even had a chance to read it to Owen because Bridget has it squirrelled away in her room. It's what prompted her to start writing multiplication problems on her walls. It's a cute picture book with witches and bats and vampires. If you multiply vampires by 0 they disappear :-D

A good friend loaned us The Book of Think and Math for Smarty Pants. The Book of Think isn't mathematics per se. It's a problem solving book and deals more with logic. Bridget seems to be enjoying it. Every now and then she poses me a problem she read from the book.

Math for Smarty Pants I haven't given her yet (uh, I sort of need to find where I put it!). I flipped through it when I first got it and was shocked to see it actually looked sort of fun! I think I might need to buy these books.

We have some other math books around the house but those are the ones I can think of now. I'm feeling the need to get more lately. More math books, more math games, more math toys. Not for the kids actually but for me. It's like there's a sort of healing going on here. The farther I get from my school days, the less math scares me. And the more my daughter gets into math, the more it seems like it might actually be something to enjoy and play with instead of suffer through and get stomach aches over. I'm learning a lot from unschooling these kids, that's for sure.