Have any of you used books like The Grapes of Math, The M&M Counting Book, Funny & Fabulous Fraction Stories or others to teach math concepts?

How did it work for you?

Do yo uhave any favorites?

I really feel like I need to steer away from my beloved Singapore Math with my daughter. I think that she might do better without the textbook / workbook approach.

My son really really likes M&M math!  We have also used Twizzlers Pull and Peel Math and Hershey's Fractions the Hershey books also have addition and subraction books.  Also enjoyable are Cindy Neuschwander Math Adventure series.
My middle son loved the game Domineering it's played with dominos and a chess/checker board.
We had a book about Domino Math, but can't remember the name.

Michelle,

You could also used computer games and online games websites to teach math. I'm assuming she's elem. age.

Heres a few I found:

http://www.gamequarium.com/math.htm  http://www.funbrain.com/  http://www.coolmath4kids.com/   http://www.mathplayground.com/games.html 

Here is another series of math books that you might be interested in:

Cheetah Math: Learning About Division from Baby Cheetahs

Panda Math: Learning About Subtraction from Hua Mei and Mei Sheng

Polar Bear Math: Learning About Fractions...

Chimp Math: Learning about Time from a Bab...

Tiger Math: Learning to Graph from a Baby...

We follow the Charlotte Mason method and also use the website Old Fashion Education. You may enjoy some of the stuff found there. oldfashionededucation.com/

Look under the MATH section. It will lead you to a lot of old fashion books that deals with mental math and I am sure it has some story based math too.

We have switched from Math U See to Alpah Omega life pac math. But I am thinking of using the old fashion math for my son who will start doing 1st grade next year.

Ashley

You might find some helpful ideas for non textbook/workbook math instruction at the Living Math website: www.livingmath.net.

Kathy

Yeah, we can do games, too. I don't like Old Fashioned Education. It's too rigorous or something. It's too much schoolwork, I think. Besides, 99.9% of the books used cannot be found in bound and printed form, and that bugs me. I need books, lots of books!

We use Ambleside Online, and are really trying to stick with the whole living books thing that Charlotte Mason advised. It feels like math is segregated from the rest of my daughter's education, and I am trying to fix that. I don't like textbooks at all. They're too dry and boring. Learning should be addictive, in my opinion. One should look forward to it.

I am looking at livingmath.net, and it seems to agree with me, and has lots of resources listed. I think I'll follow my gut here.

However, my gut is wishy-washy. I worry about twaddle at the same time. I'm a little obsessed about this lately.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Michelle,

I've been thinking about this a lot since you first posted because I too like lots of books and don't really care for textbook/workbook kinds of learning.  I want learning to look like life, not school.  But for some reason, that seems difficult to do with math.  I feel like math needs to follow a logical sequence and needs to be taught in a consistent manner.  I can hop around from one thing to another in all of the other subjects, but I think math needs to build in a logical fashion.  I like to use literature like the ones listed above to supplement and enrich the math curriculum, but I just couldn't used literature alone to teach math.  I think sometimes the math literature takes liberties in the way they explain math and they oversimplify concepts.  As much as I'd like to use just literature, I still have to hang on to my Math-U-See to make sure the kids have a good strong foundation in math.  I'm going to spend some time looking at Living Math and I hope to hear what you come up with.  I really hope it works for you if that is what you decide to do.  One thing I really love about homeschooling is that we can do whatever works best for our personalities as well as our children and we can adjust as we need to.

Amanda,

I think I can stay with a scope & sequence and still get all the lessons in while avoiding the textbooks. I'll keep you updated. =)