Video Reviews | Legendary Learning

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Standardized Education is Not the Answer

Changing the paradigm of education; I LOVE this message! And I love the artist who does these white board videos – check it out:

Teaching Kids Math – Overcome Math Anxiety with Games

Textbooks and workbooks really are not the best ways to start teaching kids math. Even if your child is mathematically inclined, there is no need to pull out the textbooks until they are older and have had a lot of friendly experience with numbers and patterns already. It’s the same way with learning to read. Kids who have been read to often, see other people read, and are regularly exposed to the printed word have a much easier time learning to read than those kids who have not.

Board games, card games, and even video games help build up a child’s familiarity and ease with mathematical thinking before they ever crack a workbook. Don’t think a game has to be labeled “Educational” to be worthwhile. Those are OK every now and then, but the best games are the ones your child will want to play again and again. I’ll show you some of our family favorites in the following video:

The books and games I mentioned in this video are:

Books: How Math Works (out of print but still available used), Family Math and Middle School Family Math, and 101 Best Family Card Games

Games: Sequence, Blokus, Cribbage, Set, Mastermind, Rummikub

Full Disclosure – I am an Amazon Affiliate, but I mainly include the links to help you read more about the items I recommend.

Math Picture Books

Math is everywhere in our lives, not just textbooks. Reading math picture books or storybooks to your kids will help to show them the friendly approachable side of numbers and patterns. There are TONS of these kinds of books, but I’ll just show you a few of the ones we used in this video. You can find a lot of these in your library or Scholastic warehouse sales.

The books I reviewed in this video are:

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Sir Cumference and the First Round Table and Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi, both by Cindy Neuschwander (there are other books in this series as well)

Opt: An Illusionary Tale by Arline and Joseph Baum

Polar Bear Math: Learning about Fractions from Klondike and Snow by Ann Whitehead Nagda and Cindy Bickel

If You Made a Million by David M. Schwartz

Big Numbers and Pictures that Show Just How Big They Are by Edward Packard

Big Book of Time: A Magical Adventure through the Seconds, Seasons, and Light-years of the Universe by William Edmonds. This book is no longer in print, but I found a similar book here.

Incredible Comparisons by Russell Ash. I can’t seem to find this book online, so maybe it is out-of-print, but here is a similar book by Russell Ash.

Learning Math using Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner first explained his theory of Multiple Intelligences in his book Frames of Mind (1983). Since then, educators everywhere have learned how important it is to discover how each individual student prefers to learn and solve problems. The eight types that Gardner has identified are: musical, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, spatial, intrapersonal, linguistic, and naturalist. The key thing to remember is that math doesn’t have to be taught or learned the same way. Mark Wahl’s book, Math for Humans: Teaching Math Through 8 Intelligences, shows us how.