Let's Play Math {Book Review and Giveaway}

"Why are you smiling?" asked my 7-year-old girl as she peered over my shoulder.  I glanced up from my book - "Let's Play Math" by Denise Gaskins - but before I could answer her question, my daughter disappeared.  A minute later, she returned with a piece of paper and a box of sparkly markers.  "Can I play too?"  I looked at the book on my lap and my smile widened.  My daughter had noticed this image on the open page:

We spent the next hour playing with the Fibonacci sequence (using crackers) and making patterns out of Tangrams. That's what I love about "Let's Play Math"; This book not only gives parents ideas for making mathematics fun for children, but it also provides concrete examples that foster a family culture of enthusiasm around math.  At our house, playing with math as a family is just part of life.

Upcoming Book Club and Math Circle {Math and Magic in Wonderland}

There is no Frigate like a Book  

To take us Lands away,  

Nor any Coursers like a Page  

Of prancing Poetry –   

This Traverse may the poorest take         

Without oppress of Toll –   

How frugal is the Chariot  

That bears a Human soul.

                               -Emily Dickinson

Have you ever read a book that you just had to tell all your friends about?  What about an enthralling math problem you just had to share?  If you nodded at the former suggestion and chuckled at the latter one, you are not alone!  One of the reasons I wrote my book, Math and Magic in Wonderland, was to make the world of mathematics as fun and accessible as the world of literature.

My family has been having such a wonderful time playing along with my math adventure novel, that I just have to share it with others.  Today I'm excited to announce the Math and Magic Book Club and Math Circle.  I invite other families to join us as we read through the book and "play math" together...

Read Aloud Books for Ages 2-5

I've always enjoyed reading aloud to my children.  When they were young, our reading sessions were more about spending quality time with my little ones and instilling a love of books in them.  Recently, I feel like the kids have not just been passively listening to the stories, but actually living them.  They played Aslan versus The White Witch (from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe) for weeks.  When one twin is being particularly demanding, the other tells her to stop being "Veruca Salt" (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).  The other day, their plastic toy horses were being used to reenact the barn fire in Black Beauty.  I could go on and on (not including all the literature-inspired artwork they have produced).  As a bibliophile myself, it warms my heart to see my children feel such a connection with the books they read.

Three years ago, when I was looking for ideas for read alouds for younger children, I looked to blogs and Facebook for recommendations.  I've been keeping track of the books we've read both for myself and also with the hopes of inspiring other families to create read-aloud traditions with their children.  Here's the list so far...

Grouping Family Members {Five Creatures}

Today's book of the day was Five Creatures by Emily Jenkins.  It's a fun book about a family with five creatures (a girl, her parents, and two cats) and all the different ways they can be put into groups.  For our activity, the girls drew pictures of our family (eight creatures total) and we came up with different ways of classifying ourselves...

Draw Along with Harold and the Purple Crayon

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson is a very cute story about a boy who literally draws various adventures for himself.  The girls like drawing along with the story as I read it to them.  The amounts of paper this activity took up used to be a lot, so we've switched to using a free drawing program on my Kindle Fire (you could use an iPad instead), where we can easily erase the picture and start again on every page...

Jack the Builder - Building Block Activity

We have a number of the MathStart picture books by Stuart Murphy, and today we did an activity based on the book Jack the Builder.  This book teaches the American way of doing basic addition (start at the last number and then count by ones from that point), and since I'm trying to teach the kids the Japanese way (via the Rightstart Math curriculum, which teaches kids to view addition in terms of 5s and 10s), I focused more on the block-building than the math.

The book is about a boy who builds various things as he stacks up more and more blocks.  I think this is a terrific book, not necessarily for teaching addition, but for its message about using your imagination and the wonderful illustrations (we spent a lot of time examining each picture and pointing out different objects we found).

For this activity, I took out our wooden blocks and the girls tried to duplicate the creations the boy was making.  There are a number of skills involved:

1. Picking out the correct blocks by color, shape, and size
2. If the same color/shape/size block is not available, identifying what criteria to use to select an alternative
3. Using the correct number of blocks
4. Placing the blocks in the right orientation to replicate the formation in the picture.

Of course I let the girls discover these skills on their own as they worked on this task:

The towers crashed before they could build the spaceship at the end, so they used their problem solving skills to engineer their own spaceships:

We counted backwards from 10 and the girls screamed "Blast Off!"  Then, like in the book, the kids knocked the towers down and started again, building all sorts of creations from their imaginations.

Mathstart Monster Musical Chairs Activity

Monster Musical Chairs is a book in Stuart Murphy's MathStart collection which teaches basic subtraction.  It has a great rhyming rhythm and is a lot of fun  - the girls love shouting "Bye Bye, Monster!" as each monster gets eliminated from the game.  I decided to add to the entertainment by making little pom-pom monsters so we can add a little dramatic play when we read the book.

The monsters were really easy to make using pom-poms, googly-eyes, and craft foam.  I tried to match the monsters to the ones in the book, and they came out really cute.  I also made chairs for them out of little paper cups, a paper towel roll, and more craft foam.

The girls eyes lit up when they woke up from their naps and discovered these little monsters.  As we read the story, we talked about how many monsters and chairs were left.  Then we played a bit of musical chairs as well so they'd understand the concept of the game.

After reading the story a couple times, E asked for her dollhouse furniture and everyone sat down for dinner:

The girls are starting to treat their toys a bit more delicately and I'm proud to say that all six monsters remained intact after a full evening of play.

Over, Under, Around, and Through with Hairy Maclary's Bone

The girls love to mix literature with dramatic play.  One of our favorite stories for this is Hairy Maclary's Bone by Lynley Dodd.  I randomly stumbled upon her books while surfing Amazon - they are very popular in New Zealand and the UK.  We have a number of other books in her series, which follow the adventures of a little terrier, and they are all really cute.

The plot of the book is that Hairy Maclary gets a bone, and all the other neighborhood dogs follow him around.  The dogs go through a sign, under a hedge, around a boat yard, over a hill, and jump over a wall.  In each activity one dog gets left behind until Hairy Maclary gets to go home with the bone all by himself.  This book lends itself to a great discussion on words such as over, under, around, and through.  After reading each section, we demonstrate the action.  The girls navigate through some chairs, commando-crawl under the table, climb over the couch, run around the room, and jump off a stepstool...  basically turning our living room into a giant obstacle course!  We've been doing this activity a lot in the winter when it's too cold to go to the playground.  Here are some pictures of the fun:

Through.

 Under.

 Over.

Getting ready to jump.

Easy.  Physical.  Fun.

Linking to It's Playtime linky: