What fun! Doing Simple Math in Your Head compiles all sorts of amazing mathematical tricks into one diaper-bag-sized book, ready for those odd moments spent in waiting rooms and restaurants. Have you ever needed to figure a tip quickly, without resorting to writing on the napkin? Have you ever wondered how others can convert fractions to decimals so quickly? Have you ever worried that your receipt was not computed correctly but didn't have a calculator available to check it quickly? After working through this book, you will have an arsenal of tricks available to do these things in your head, quickly and accurately.

According to Mr. Howard, "being able to do problems in your head is basically being able to simplify. When you can do that, the rest is easy." He leads us through three chapters, elegantly and simply teaching us how to look at things differently so that they become easier. The book begins with an Introduction that describes how these methods are different from what we learned from our schoolbooks. This is followed by three chapters titled "Making Things Easier", "Problems and Solutions", and "Background: Basic Arithmetic". The book closes with an Index and a Glossary of technical "math" words that are not necessarily used in the book but which should be understood. The book is organized with subtitles at the top of each page, allowing you to skim quickly to find the topic you need or to browse until you find an interesting topic to study. Spending a few hours practicing the techniques taught in this book will make practical, everyday math much easier!

I have long been a fan of the poems for two voices books by Paul Fleischman. This book puts a twist on the idea by covering math topics in poems. It's a really unique and engaging way to memorize a math concept, reciting it as a poem. A poem for two voices is a poem recited by two people where sometimes the same words are said in tandem, sometimes alternately, and sometimes, the speakers speak at the same time saying different things. Here is a sample of part of a poem from the book: (The first column is the first speaker and the second column, the second - shown smaller than actual size)

Some of the math concepts in the poems are fairly simple ideas that would pertain to a grammar school student, however most of the ideas are for middle schoolers or high schoolers. There were a few math concepts I had never heard of, such as fractals, (the geometry of nature), Fibonacci numbers (adding the last two numbers in a series to give the next number), and Mobius strips (circular strip with a twist in it).

While you don't learn everything you need to know about the math concepts in the poems, you get an introduction to the idea and the basic or interesting facts. For tessellations, the reader learns that not all figures tessellate; for triangles, the reader learns that the angles in the figure must equal 180 degrees. Some of the accompanying illustrations are also instructive. I could not have visualized the Mobius strip without the drawing of it.

This is a fun way to talk about these concepts. Trying to say the poems as a team takes a lot of concentration and brings a lot of laughs along the way. The book would make a great addition to a living math program or be a nice break from a formal textbook program.

Recommended for grades 4-12

Audio tape designed to help children with some addition "math facts" and with skip counting as a preparation for multiplication further down the road. Simple songs are sung without accompaniment to familiar tunes. The tunes are rather catchy and we find ourselves regularly singing them around the house. (Such as the "9s" - 9, 18 and 27, 36 and 45, 54 and 63, 72 and 81, nine of them, round the sun, make their orbit one by one, nine of them, round the sun and counting them is fun). One side of the tape includes all of the songs sung by a simple tenor voice. The other side has the same songs played at a faster speed (which sounds something like "Alvin and the Chipmunks" for you Generation Xers.) There is another tape which I haven't reviewed which uses Biblical themes and tunes for the songs.

"Freedom is not a license for chaos" is my son's signature below his email messages. It was written by Norton Juster, of The Phantom Toolbooth fame, and it comes from our almost-17-year-old's favorite book.

The phrase is the turning point and premise of this amazing, simply delightful little Math book. Math? That is our son's most disliked subject. Wait, The Dot and the Line is not a Math book! It is a hilarious comedy! But is that all? It is a romance, a story of love deeply felt, pursued, capable of provoking great things in the soul. In a little math book? Is it possible? Yes, it is.

Our classic languages-loving son reads it aloud every time this book visits us from the library. He suffers with the straight, dull and unbending line when driven to the "edge" (of the paper— the line is drawn on the edge of the page) as the "perfect by every measure" dot flirts around with the anarchist, slothful squiggle. Moved by great love, the line at first attempts to show its own grandeur by asserting its importance in art, world politics, sports. To no avail: the dot is not impressed. Then the unimaginable happens: when almost giving up, the line, using great concentration, becomes able to make angles!

What follows next is what makes this little book a great book: the enthusiastic line makes more and more angles in a chaotic frenzy, until... it realizes that chaos without order leads nowhere. It stops, straightens itself again and it discovers that freedom is not a license for chaos. From then on, life changes for the line: exercising great control and virtue, it discovers a new world:

For months he practiced in secret. Soon he was making squares and triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, rhomboids, polyhedrons, trapezoids, parallelepiped, decagons, tetragrams and an infinite number of other shapes so complex that he had to letter his sides and angles to keep his place. Before long he had learned to carefully control ellipses, circles and complex curves...

Ah, the virtue of Mathematics! The beauty of its exact angles and dimensions. The rhythm, art and music of what it is able to create, using exercise and order! I will refrain from spoiling it completely for the new reader, but let me repeat the "moral" of the story: to the vector, the spoils.

The back jacket, after telling us that the author, among other things, runs "a support group for negative numbers" (one can glimpse Mr. Juster's opinion of the state of the culture in the 60s) mentions an award winning film, and I found it on You Tube. I was happy to see that that the screenplay was also written by the author but I warn you that the book is much better. This new 2001 edition has wonderful graphics and some different pictures as well.