Math Fables - Lessons that Count

 By Greg Tang
Illustrated by Heather Cahoon

This is a great idea, and my daughter does ask to read it, but in practice it's a little too much in one book.

All the numbers from one to ten are represented, and each number has stories for every possible equation.

 This works well for the first few numbers.  We like to read about the squirrels and divide them up into two and two or one and three.  Great.

But later on, it gets really boring.  Especially nine and ten.  We've never read through the story about the ants.  Two eat watermellon and eight eat cheese.  Three took home bread and seven took home lettuce.  etc. etc. etc. until little hands are all over the book forcefully turning pages to get you to stop.

The rhyming and meter are pretty dreadful.  But seeing as my daughter likes the beginning and it IS actually educational, I give this one a pass.

La Chenille qui Fait des Trous

 By Eric Carle

I always hated this book when I was a kid.  The first time it was read to me was in kindergarten.  We read it every time we went to the library for the next two years, except for the times that we read "I'll Love You Forever", which I also hated.  I hated it because it was a baby book and I was so tired of listening to my teachers fawn over it forever.  I was getting into chapter books for crying out loud.

But it is a great baby book.  I like reading it now.  And it's fantastic to have a copy in English and in French.  My daughter likes reading it in either language, because she already knows all her foods, so she understands at least a third of it. I'm hoping she'll start learning her days of the week soon.  We read both copies over and over.  I'll have to buy the French one soon.

Lifetime - The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives

 By Lola M. Schaefer
Illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal

This book is longer than pictured.  It has huge pages and is great for cuddling up to read with kids.

It is also a counting book for older kids, which I very much appreciate.

 The animals featured are random, and the objects to count reflect an amazing part of that animal's life, like a caribou dropping its antlers, or a seahorse male birthing babies.

The illustrations are in this newfangled modern style, but not twee.  They're really nice.  I'm still finding this style of illustration fresh, probably because it's so clean and simple.

Mathematically, this book is actually useful because it counts by tens for a bit, then shows hundreds of things, then finally one thousand.  It's not about learning all the numbers in between, it's about visualizing numbers.  My kids aren't really old enough to comprehend the concept of one thousand, but when they're ready, this book will be perfect.

We still look through it anyway, because the animal facts are cool.

The Doorbell Rang

 By Pat Hutchins

This book was almost good.  My daughter loved it for the direct repetition on each page.  Plus it has a catch at the end; the doorbell rings, but they don't tell you who it is.  "BUT WHO IS AT THE DOOR?"  She would yell at me, never satisfied with my answer.

My husband, on the other hand, found it too repetitive and a little bit creepy.  He also hated the art.

It's a math story about 12 cookies divided many different ways.  But they don't tell you that it's 12 cookies, so maybe it could be a fun math game for an older kid?  maybe.

Personally I didn't love it or hate it.  But I didn't keep it in the house for very long, because I think owning it and reading it every single night would wear on me.

Bears On Wheels

 By Stan and Jan Berentsain

Not Berenstein, as everyone seemingly used to pronounce it.

This book is amazing!  It teaches basic math!  I wouldn't call it an amazing counting book.  There are better books for that.

 The bears' shirts are different colours and the different vehicles that they ride or drive have different numbers of wheels.  It has 2+2, 1+3, 1+4, 5+5 and a few others.  Nothing incredibly difficult.  It's just a nice visual representation of the concept of adding and is really appealing to preschoolers.

My daughter seems to understand addition and I sincerely believe that this book made a big impact on that development.

Too Many Cats

 By Sindy McKay
Illustrated by Meredith Johnson

This was a fantastic book that I randomly requested from the library because my daughter demanded more cat books.

It's a "We Both Read" book, meaning that the pages on the left have story, and the pages on the right have one or two words with a picture.

 The story is a pretty hokey one about a girl who wants a cat and dreams that she gets ten instead, each a different colour.  It means that it's teaching kids to sight-read colours and numbers instead of learn phonetically, which is okay.  You kind of have to learn both ways, because some of those numbers are impossible to sound out phonetically.

This book was a real hit.  Before I give it back, I think I'm going to photocopy some pages and cut them up for a mix-and-match activity with my daughter. 

One Night in the Zoo

 By Judith Kerr

We're big fans of Mog at our house, for all of its flaws, so I've started borrowing all the Judith Kerr books I can get ahold of.  (My husband even bought a copy of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which is supposed to be amazing.)

One Night in the Zoo is the first one we've borrowed and I'm pretty impressed.

 It's a counting book with zoo animals doing magical things in the night, all rhyming with perfect rhythm.

The pictures are pale, but they're really charming.

It has big full-sized pages and a recap at the end showing all the animals in their groups surrounding their corresponding number.

I'll probably buy a copy of this to keep.

Friday Post - Number Mats

 This is a "Teacher's Friend" product published by Scolastic.  I found it at the thrift store for a dollar.

Not all of the resources in this series are useful.  A lot of them are redundant or too simplistic.  This one is great for a few reasons.

First off, we love identifying numbers.  It's a favourite game.  So a box full of foam numbers that you can match up on cards is a fantastic activity on its own.

The cards with stars to count are great right now, too, because they're organized in basic dice patterns.  I'm learning a lot about teaching addition now that my daughter is working on beginner math.  It's interesting to see which concepts are easy and which are difficult.  She can count forwards and backwards to 10, and she can count up to 29 (Sometimes 30), but adding two numbers together makes no sense to her.  She has, however, memorized that 2 plus 2 is 4, and if she sees two groups of two, she will recognize it as four objects without taking the time to count.  Learning by rote and repetition has helped her understand elements of addition already, so I'm totally embracing the idea of her memorizing dice patterns and not bothering with written out math equations.

Lastly, the wipe off cards for practicing writing are fantastic.  She gets so angry when she makes a mistake and can't erase it.  This way there's no stress. 

This is the best dollar I've ever spent.

Friday Post - Chutes and Ladders

 Retroland has a pretty good post about this game.

This is a pre-2000's version.  Ebay says it's from 1999, which makes sense, I guess, looking at that boy with the burgundy vest.  That's a pretty dated style.

But, as you can see, it's totally PC by this point, at least.

It was really interesting to read the article on Retroland and discover that this has always been a game about morality. I've never had a copy in my house growing up, so I never played a version like this. They got a bit carried away here, too.  Just look at the arbitrary rewards.

On square 9 we have a boy who mows the lawn and gets to see sad animals at the circus.  That cat on 28 features a fair bit, sometimes dealing out punishment, sometimes rewarding with cuddles.  Higher up at 51, a girl sweeps the floor and gets movie tickets.  At 71, a boy returns a damsel's purse and she buys him ice cream.

It's all pretty ridiculous, and I can't imagine that there was ever a good edition of this crummy game.  The spinner is supposed to be easier than dice, but my daughter can throw dice now and can still barely play this game because counting to 100 is not very fun for her and the pictures are too distracting.  If the game wasn't so long and these weird stories weren't everywhere, maybe we'd get through more than half of it.  The best part is, none of these moral lessons make a dent on her anyway.  She's convinced of her own moral superiority and is quick to judge the kids on the board.  It's kind of hilarious.

Ten Little Lambs

 By Alice B. McGinty
Illustrated by Melissa Sweet

This isn't a bad little book.  It's been pretty popular.  It starts out as a sleepover with ten children, but once they're in bed they transform into sheep.

 The text is a repetitive rhyme that counts down from ten to one.  On each page there's a different mischievous activity that the sheep engage in.

Most of the rhythm is good, but not all of it.

On each page, on of the sheep yawns or falls asleep, and the faces of the sleeping sheep who didn't make it through the night are shown along the sides of the pages.  It's pretty engaging.

It's not the best art and not the best poetry, but it's a pretty good concept.  My kids were engaged with it.

Friday Post - Math Rabbit

 Math Rabbit is an excellent game.  I found it for my daughter and we've been playing it together.  I was skeptical at first because it seemed to be a weird mix of way too easy and way too hard.  But then I realized that each mini-game can be set to a different level of difficulty and that at each level there is a different list of options.

 Any game can be set to a beginner level where the user is only ever asked to count objects up to 10.  But at their hardest, the games use numbers up to 99 with addition and subtraction.

The detail with which you can customize each game means that you can tailor the questions to the student.  Best of all, the questions never automatically get too hard once you've done too many of them.

 The elephant show at the top is a game for matching numbers to equations or numbers to a group of dots.

The Calliope game is just counting to 8 and doesn't have a harder setting.  It does have a free-compose setting, though!

The sea lion show is about patterns using addition or subtraction.  (We have currently mastered "plus one" and I'm trying to teach my daughter how to do "plus 2" to any number.)

 The Balloon Matching game is just a memory game, but memory is my daughter's favourite right now.  She'll happily play this game endlessly.  I'm excited that there's the option of "number to number name" because I'll use that when she starts reading...

There's a lot of repetition in this game, but there's some serious incentive; every time you win a game, you get a ticket, and if you have enough tickets, you can buy prizes.  The game saves your prizes, there are tons to collect, and once you've purchased them, they dance around at the bottom of the screen. 

My daughter happily plays the mini-games over and over, especially if I'm around to play with her.  It's great practice!

Daddy Hugs

 Karen Katz has some good baby books.  This one is a favourite for a few reasons.

First off, the art is okay.  There's a bit of collage in with the drawing/painting.  It's pretty colourful.

Secondly, it depicts an androgynous baby, and no mom.  Every other book that we have features mom and baby, and quite often it's a little girl or little boy.  There is a mommy hugs book, if you prefer, but if you're looking to balance out your collection a little and encourage a relationship with Dad, this is great. It was also really reassuring during a time of serious separation anxiety where she wouldn't give Dada any hugs, that she would still insist on reading this book over and over again because it showed that, really, she loved her dad to pieces.

Lastly, the numbers.  Usually baby books with letters and numbers are a waste of time.  This book has the numeral, the word for the number spelled out, and a number of stars to count on each page for all the numbers up to 10.  My daughter actually learned her numbers using this book.  Most of that was time, place and her temperament, but part of it was the layout and engaging subject material in this book.

Friday Post - Young Math

 I've been looking up a lot of really old abandoned games recently while trying to find 'edutainment' for the toddler.  I found this gem.  Young Math is a really old and really simple math game that has animated representations of mathematical equations.

 My oldest is starting to understand addition, but definitely isn't ready to do equations by herself.  This is going to be so helpful when we're ready to take the plunge.  The equation is displayed below, and items being added or subtracted are shown above.  The only downside is that you have to choose the right answer before the animation confirms that you've made the right choice.
There is no drilling, and the numbers don't go very high, so this isn't for practice, just learning.

 The depot games are great, too.  You can play addition, subtraction, or number order.  My oldest could probably do number order, and I know she'll get a real kick out of playing with cranes and bulldozers.


Lastly, there's a game where you complete the pattern.  This is waaaay easier than those "draw the missing picture" activities in colouring books.  The controls are pretty easy for all the games.  The child needs to know right and left and be able to figure out the arrow keys, but there is no time limit or serious penalty for pressing the wrong button.  Installation is a little wacky with dosbox, because you need to mount the folder as the A drive and already have the your destination drive mounted as C before you install.  But that's about it.

 

Friday Post - Number Train

These are pretty standard.  I got it for all of $2 at the thrift store.  This one is Melissa and Doug.  It looks like a square puzzle on the board, but it's just one long train with 20 cars and an engine.

It's been brilliant.  When we first got it, my daughter could count to 12 by rote, and didn't quite understand what she was doing.  She casually worked at it for about two weeks and then, finally, something snapped and she knew how to put it together herself.  Not only that, she loves to sit on the couch with the box and point to each train, counting to 20 out loud.  Shortly after, something else snapped and she was reading double digits all the way to 99.

There's still something missing; she obviously doesn't fully understand how numbers work because she's still a bit confused about the concept of relative differences in size, but this puzzle really helped her visualize what she's doing when she's counting.  I'm so glad we came across it.

Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever

 We love Richard Scarry so much.  His books are old, though, and often compiled kind of weirdly.  This is no exception.

"I am a Bunny" is featured in this book, but most of the pages are missing, and there's an extra page with insects on it that isn't in our board book version.

Other stories seem to be complete.  The nursery rhymes are scattered throughout.  The prints are of varying degrees of quality.

You take what you can get, though.

 Not all of the stories are good, but the ones that we like to read are fantastic.  They label instruments, they explain colour theory, there's counting and letters and all kinds of educational fun.

My favourite is the alphabet of things to feed and not feed a hippo.  My daughter is on the edge of understanding comedy. If you ask her whether we should feed the hippo a nest or a nut, she will angrily explain that she already picked out the banana on the first page.

I'm sure she'll get the joke in a year or two.

Friday Post - Hi Ho! Cherry-O

I'm really trying to get my daughter into the boardgames ASAP.  We're pretty big board game nerds, except that my husband isn't into two player games as much.  I know it'll be a long time before the kids can join in on anything by Rio Grande, so I have to start working on them early.

This game is pretty great.  I don't mind playing it, either.  I mean, it's mind numbingly simple and boring, but it's hilariously cute to watch an excited 2 year old go through the motions of playing.  It took her two days to figure out that she has to spin the spinner fast, do what it tells her to do, and then wait for other people to take their turn before she can spin again.  Maybe, if we're lucky, she'll make enough progress that we can start learning to play chutes and ladders.

Our copy was second hand, so the art isn't as offensive as the modern version (the new version has different coloured trees with corresponding cherries, but really, who cares).  The game play is pretty simple; you spin the arrow and count cherries as you move them from your tree to the barrel.  Sometimes you have to move cherries back to the tree, though.  My daughter hates doing that and will often spin multiple times and even just point the arrow to the number she desires. 

After three days of playing the game, she now just moves the cherries wherever, changes the barrels around, tells us what we're allowed to do, and abandons the game to play with the pieces in an arbitrary fashion.  She's displayed a few times that she can play the game properly following the rules, so whatever.  She'll start playing properly again by the time she's three.

Best Counting Book Ever

 By Richard Scarry

(Apologies for the glare over "best" in the picture)

This really IS the best counting book ever.  So many pages of counting... all the way to 100!

 There's a great story from 1 to 10 about the cat family and the pig-firefighters.  Mama cat catches a watermelon!  My daughter is constantly talking about that part of the book at all times of the day.

 Beyond the story at the beginning, there are so many other cute critters to count organized by colour, clothing, activity, vehicle and more.  The animals are organized in groups of 5 or 10, so that you can count multiples.  Brilliant.

At the beginning and end of the book, there are some common equations that you can check out with your child.

This is a long book with many, many pages of counting.  My daughter will sit and flip through the whole thing with delight, even while angrily insisting that there are no numbers after 20.

Learn to Count with Northwest Coast Native Art

 With art by:

Ryan Cranmer
Corey Bulpitt
Eric Parnell
Francis Dick
Maynard Johnny Jr.
Terry Starr

My parents picked this up at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  It's basically the prettiest counting book we have.  I hope my kids enjoy native art when they're older.