Fun Math books…

I was at the library yesterday.  As the kids browsed through the books looking for what they wanted, I wandered over to the math section.  (Yes, I know right where it is.)  Dearie was talking last week about how much she liked some of the fun math books she has read.  I was looking for something similar, but it was hard.  Most of the books were either for little kids or for adults.  Not much in the way of books for middle school kids. (She CAN read books written for adults, but many of them are VERY boring.  I know.  I’ve read many of them.)  I found a few that I thought might work and went and found the kids and went home.

That night Dearie read the first five chapters of a statistics comic book.  She said that the math was too hard and that she wanted to read it with me so that I could explain it to her.  No problem, I can do that.  We sat down and started with chapter two.  It didn’t seems so hard, so I skimmed through the next few chapters.  Wow!  Wait a minute.  This is comic book, not a college statistics book.  Well, I guess it was written as a supplement for college statistics.  The math in chapter five is calculus.  Yep, calculus. (Maybe pre-calculus, but I don’t think so.  However it has been a long time since I took calculus and I don’t think that I ever took a class called pre-calculus.)  No wonder dearie was a bit lost, LOL.  Guess I need to screen those books a bit closer.

To be honest, I am impressed that she got that far in the book.  It has a story, but it is not that interesting.  (She said that she gave up on the math and just read the story.) So anyway, that is how I keep my mathy kids thinking.  We skip “real” math and just read books from the library, LOL.  (Disclaimer: We did skip her math book today to read this book, and it has happened before, but it is not an everyday thing.  I do teach her “real” math too.)