Making Math Fun!

Math has never been my "thing". It was my least favorite subject in school and I barely made it thru Algebra. I love letters, words and stories; numbers, letters and equations- not so much. I do realize the great importance of math and honestly, I wish I would have kept my mental math more up to par and not just delegated that skill to my smart phone. Always something to work towards, I suppose! But, my little boys love math and have so naturally caught on to it. They find math problems everywhere in every day life and take great pride in their budding skills. I am sure my oldest would do just fine if I set a run of the mill math text book in front of him with just basic math equations to solve. However, there are so many wonderful and fun out of the box math books and teaching ideas out there for his age I just can't quite bring myself to do it! 

We have been using a mixture of Miquon Math Orange Book and Kate Snow's Addition Facts that Stick as our main math curriculum. But we've also been using a fun math supplement that I mainly wanted to share with you today! 100 Numbers Wildlife Coloring Book by Sarah Janisse Brown of Thinking Tree Books is a fabulous workbook that focuses on teaching the 100 chart. The 100 chart concept is such a great tool to get kids acquainted with the first 100 numbers and what they look like in succession. You can use it as a number line, to look for patterns, and to skip count by twos, fives, tens, etc. A book I picked up this fall on teaching math in homeschool-Let's Play Math by Denise Gaskins, has a whole section on different activities and games you can use a 100 chart to do. We jumped into our 100 Numbers book and tried out a few.

First, I had Cole take some counter stones and count by 5's and mark it off with the stones.

Then we marked only the numbers with 7's in them and found a neat design.

Another neat, creative activity we did was find and color in which numbers would "make" a heart. 

The book itself offers multiple activities- a new "way" to count to 100 each time! Some examples are color all numbers with twos, write all your favorite numbers, color all the even numbers, and many more.

 Each math page has a corresponding fun animal coloring page. They vary from realistic black and white animal photos to detailed, adult coloring book style pictures to color in. Some pages even come with lines to write a short description or story about the featured animal.

I am sure this is a book we will have no problem filling up with colorful fun and numbers by the end of the year!

Thanks to Thinking Tree Books for providing this wonderful book for me to review and share with you all.