Thanks to the generosity of author Kimberly Moore, I am giving away a complete set of the beautiful Arithmetic Village picture books. You can read the first book free online.
When you think of math do you think of a light-hearted fairy tale?
No? Then come and meet some of the delightful characters who live in Arithmetic Village.
Polly Plus collects jewels slowly and methodically, Linus Minus is carefree and loses his. Tina Times and King David Divide… well you’ll see.
The first book offers the overview of the math concepts. These are then demonstrated through the lives of each character. The books are designed to be supported by a manipulative kit [homemade: see video below] with 100 jewels, 10 golden bags, and a treasure chest…
— Kimberly Moore
Proposal: Arithmetic Village
My fantasy-loving daughter Kitten would have been thrilled with this math program when she was little, just as this 6yo girl was. But it’s not just for girls — here is a thorough review by a homeschool mom of two boys.
Visit the Arithmetic Village website to read more about the books and explore the activity pages (links under each topic in the main page menu). Or check out Kim’s YouTube videos for activity ideas.
How to Enter the Giveaway
Update: The giveaway is closed, and the winner is announced below.
Do you have children in preschool to first grade? Even if you live outside the U.S., feel free to enter! Kim says she would be happy to ship internationally.
You have two ways to enter the contest:
- Scroll down and leave a comment on this post answering the question:
What is your favorite math activity for young children? - Post about the contest on your own blog (or on a homeschooling or parenting forum, if you don’t have a blog), and then come here and add a comment with the link to your post.
You may do both, to double your chances — but please make sure your link is in a separate comment from your answer to the question, or I may forget to count it separately.
I will accept entries for nearly two weeks: through Sunday, July 17. After that, I will count up all the entries (numbered in order of their appearance in the comment section) and go to random.org to generate the winning number. I will email the winner to get your address, which I’ll then pass on to Kimberly so she can send you your books.
…And the Winner Is…
Wow! 37 comments, and so many great ideas for playing math with little ones: baking, folding laundry, real-life counting (in multiple languages), abacus, looking for patterns, counting coins and shopping, graphing, and games. Thank you all for sharing!
Random.org came up with 15 as the winning number. Congratulations, driftwoods. I’ve sent you an email asking for your mailing address.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
This seems like a great series of books. I have never seen math taught in such a way. Very Cool!
Jim
Elementary Math Interventions Specialist
I had downloaded a math game called Add It from a fellow blogger. The kids get candies to use as the peices and if they are all their when they’ve finished adding all the cards they get to eat the goodies!! It has been a big hit in our house’! 🙂 Here’s a link to my blog post about it! 🙂
http://books2bridgemiles.blogspot.com/2011/01/penguins-in-wa.html
These books look amazing!!! I’ll be crossing my fingers!
My favorite math activities for littles are the ones that are integrated into real life: “How many forks do we need for dinner? How many cookies does each of us get to be fair? How many pairs of shoes in the entryway, and how many individual shoes? Let’s see how many of these little cups of water fit into that big bowl.”
This book looks wonderful! I can’t wait to check it out.
We really like doing math while baking. Math that results in yummy food. You can’t beat it!
My favourite math activity to do with my 5 year is probably baking. She loves helping in the kitchen and loves counting and measuring the ingredients. It’s a special time for the two of us to spend together.
Cooking is our favorite math activity!
My daughter and I have been practicing fractions while folding laundry and pouring drinks.. It really seems to be clicking 🙂
my twins are too young (in August they turn 2), so I don’t take part to the contest. But I would like to know when I can start let them doing math and how to start with!
We love playing with math in all real world situations. We count houses, cows, steps, cars, scoops, etc. We play with math a lot at the grocery store which keeps the little one interested and learning while we shop.
Would love a set of these beautiful books!
I love to have him skip count, but he’s not so thrilled with it. 😉
Our favorite math activity (of the moment) is counting the stairs as we climb. We count in multiple languages to mix it up!
My daughter loves card games and the 4yo boy loves to cook with mommy. Both would love this curriculum. Thanks for the chance to win.
We love to play dice games and sidewalk math.
I have a two year old. He learnt numbers from reading licence plates of the parked cars. we count about everything that we come across in 4 languages (English, Spanish, Hindi and Telugu). The one we are currently working on is fractions ( cutting half the tortilla’s, dividing the pizza slices for mommy, daddy and himself..etc)
This is so fun. I’m been thinking a lot about math concepts with my 3 year old lately. Right now, our favourite math activity is probably baking (1 cup, 1/2 cup etc.).
My 5 (almost 6) year old son is very interested in negative numbers, he loves to discuss addition and subtraction of both negatives and positives. I find that he’s particularly receptive to maths whilst we are out for a walk.
I would love the books! We have been reading Right Start Math books a lot lately. Our favorite activity is the “Cube Game.” We have variations of the game, but basically it starts with 100 counting cubes. You roll the dice and count out the number of dice. The person with the most cubes wins. Another version is to roll the dice twice and either add or subtract the numbers. You can’t get the cubes unless you have the correct answer. Simple, but my kids love it!
I’m a teacher of Maths and I profit all the ocasions to ask questions to my children; and they like it; sometimes they ask me for a problem, usually when we are having dinner and we relax after a a long hard day.
We love to play with abacus – counting in groups of 2s, 3s, 4s or 5s. We are going to learn chinese abacus next!
We like to play card games and I clicked on your ad for ixl.com. My kids argue over who gets to play it first! Oh, and we like to cook. We do a lot of measuring and comparing.
These books look great! Currently my preschooler’s favorite mathy things to do are puzzles and pattern finding. She also loves embroidery sewing, which is a new activity.
Not my favourite math activity, but my kids. Looking through catalogues, adding up what they want to buy, adding up pocket money and seeing if they have enough and how much they have left over.
My soon to be 1st grader loves thinking she knows more than her big (almost 11 year old) sister. She sometimes writes math facts in her spare time in her own notebook, so she can show how much she knows. Adding with real coins that we have found around the house (and sometimes getting to keep the coins) also keeps her motivated, and helps practice multiples of 5’s, 10’s, and 25’s, as well as regular addition.
Our son loves counting his cars and blocks, actually anything that we have multiples of. We will sit there for hours just counting,
We enjoy math games and songs. In addition, we use just about anything for counting and exploring patterns (flowers, rocks, beads, etc). We also play a game called “what if…” For example, “I have one bean on my plate now but what if I add two more to my plate? Then I’d have three!”
We like to graph any kind of food or snack items. We estimate how many fruit snack will be in the package and them figure out whether we estimated more or less than the actual. We then make a graph. Sometimes we make word problems… How many more red snacks are there than yellow ones?
Terry
CA
I’d love to win this to help remedial work with my youngest. I love using marbles to do division with him but this is better!
With young children, I like to make patterns and divide objects into groups.
Very creative! My young ones need hands-on ideas for learning. They like to play card games for math.
These look so neat! I have never seen them before. My favorite math activity is any game! I love it when my kids want to keep the score or do the math in a game! My older kids are loving Monopoly right now. 🙂
Thanks for your contribution to this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling. It will post Wednesday morning, July 13th, on my blog, A Life Supreme (www.asupremelife.blogspot.com ). I’d appreciate it if you could advertise the carnival here on your blog. And please consider using one of the COH images found here: http://whyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2008/05/we-have-winners-of-carnival-of.html.
Blessings,
Laura
My children and I enjoy cooking, reading math-based stories and playing games together.
We love to play math games and to read math based books. We also like to cook too.
kaos2me at gmail dot com
My four years old’s favorite math game is to practice addition then check to if he’s right using a calculator.
I have been playing a game lately called “Unlucky Seven” with my 5 yo son. He loves it and does not realize he is practicing addition while we play. 🙂
My daughter loves to play number games. Sum swamp is a hit around here.
I build a lot of math into lunch time normally. Example: How many grapes do you want today? Ok get that many. After she eats one, we do subtraction. Sometimes, we add more and we’ve even done fractions. It’s a great way to work in fun math and it not seem like work.
Wow! 37 comments, and so many great ideas for playing math with little ones: baking, folding laundry, real-life counting (in multiple languages), abacus, looking for patterns, counting coins and shopping, graphing, and games. Thank you all for sharing!
Random.org came up with 15 as the winning number. Congratulations, driftwoods. I’ve sent you an email asking for your mailing address.