Educations Matters: Diverse Children's Book Reviews
Education and parenting. Helping your child with reading, math, science and getting along with others.
Chinese and English Nursery Rhymes by Faye-Lynn Wu and Kieren Dutcher is an appealing CD and book combo to expose younger kids (ages 2-7) to Chinese through songs and nursery rhymes. It would be a great in a classroom as well for units on China and/or Chinese New Year. I highly recommend this book!
True or False series by Melvin and Gilda Berger is a young science series in a fun question-and-answer format. My kids reviewed Storms and Birds and gave both a thumbs up. For ages 6-9.
This is a fun word problem book featuring birds with problems in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This would be a fun book to use for the summer to sneak in a little math but in a really fun way. The sweet spot is 2nd to 3rd graders, but even my preschooler will enjoy this book if we do the problems together by drawing out rows of birds to solve multiplication and division which would be new for him.
This brochure from the National Association for the Education of Young Children comes home with every about-to-be-a-kindergartner at our school. This is their guide to parents for raising a reader and writer. I just condensed it and added a few ideas of my own.
I blogged on how much I liked Dr. Stanley Schmidt’s Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, As Serious as It Needs to Be.
Good news! I didn’t realize he wrote a whole series of math textbooks: Fractions, Decimals and Percents, Advanced Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics.
Life of Fred: Beginning Alegebra as serious as it needs to be is a totally different and actually fun textook method. You go as fast as you want. It teaches algebra — abstract stuff — in relate-able story vignettes. In short, this is the textbook or method for kids who are visual or who need something concrete and non-intimidating to learn algebra. With this textbook, they will actually like algebra.
This series is about Sam Gribley living unhappily in New York City who runs away to some forgotten family land in the Catskill Mountains. He learns to live off the land with the help of a kindly librarian, a falcon baby, a flint and steele, penknife, and a ball of cord. He is joined by his sister in book two, and book three chronicles Frightful’s migration journal south.