The Grapes Of Math by Gregory Tang Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Grapes Of Math
Book Review: More Riddles, Patterns, and Problem Solving
Summary: 5 Stars
This great book provides the opportunity for children to enjoy mental math challenges. The riddles guide the reader to the author's solution. However, our son enjoyed looking for patterns and using his own clever ideas to quickly solve the problems. I gave this book to my six year old son the summer before he began second grade. He loved the rhymes and the pictures. He especially liked finding clever ways to count the objects without counting one by one. We made a family game of solving each riddle, working to see who would solve it first. Then we shared our strategies and reviewed the author's strategy which is presented in the back of the book.
I highly recommend this book! It provides good mental math practice in a fun way. It also reinforces the fact that there are many ways to solve a problem. Gifted children love patterns. This book builds on that and helps them to see additional ways in which finding patterns could be useful.
Book Review: PCC Student Review
Summary: 4 Stars
My audience was a nephew who is currently in the 4th grade. Overall he found the book to be visually appealing and easy to follow. The math involved in the book seemed to be below his level of math comprehension as he was able to correctly and quickly see the patterns of the shapes and was able to come up with various way to find the correct answer. The patterns became easily visible to him, but only after one or two examples were done, from there on out he breezed through it. The rhymes placed a smile upon his face and I was asked to read the book one more time. Perhaps this book was a little above him, but for the target school year group of 1-4, its not at all bad to aid children in conceptualizing a typical problem in a different manner to ease solution finding.Book Review: Pima math 147
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book to a 4th grader. She loved the book. She thought the riddles were funny and we solved them together. I loved that the different ways to solve the riddle are in the back of the book. We would read the riddle together, talk about the answer, and then look at the different ways we could have solved it. This was a fabulous book! The riddles are clever, and cute and its a great way to challenge kids to think creatively!Book Review: Quick Counts Build Confidence and Interest in Arithmetic!
Summary: 5 Stars
Greg Tang has put together a series of counting riddles which challenge you to find short cuts to a faster answer. Each problem provides the introduction to a new challenge. The riddles are written in verse and encourage you to develop your skills in patern recognition, grouping, and multi-step thinking. The book will be as much fun for parents as for youngsters, and can provide the basis for spotting interesting problems in the world around you. Clever rhymes, hints, and colorful illustrations combine to provide plenty of visual and mental stimulation. The riddles focus on natural objects like animals, insects, plants, and fruit to increase awareness of the patterns occuring around us. The riddles have fun names (like Fish School, Grapes of Math, Win-Doze, and For the Birds). My favorite riddles were Ant Attack and It's a Jungle Out There.
The left hand page contains a colorful computer illustration provided by Harry Briggs. These are large and appropriately ambiguous to hide the patterns a little. Color and shape are especially used well to complicate the counting problem. On the right hand page is a riddle, containing a clue at the end. "To help you find the right amount/Group by fives before you count" is one such clue. At the back of the book are the solutions to each riddle.
Pattern recognition riddles help you to see squares and rectangles within more complex designs. You are also encouraged to see diamonds as being squares rotated by 45 degrees. Many times a pattern is repeated, and that becomes the basis of multiplication.
Grouping encourages you to add common sums. An example would be sets of (8 + 3) + (6 + 5) + (4 + 7) = 33. By seeing that you can add to common subnumbers, you quickly find three elevens and then multiply by 3 in your head.
The two-step riddles have you determine what the total universe is (usually by multiplying) and then subtracting the exceptions to get the subset. One example has a building with regular intervals of windows, some lit and some not. How many are lit?
Most people never get to do the fun part of math, which is thinking up new and better ways to do things that build on imagination. By allowing your child to see the potential playfulness of what mathematicians do, this book will help create a better sense of what math is all about and that it can be fun.
After you have had a good time with the book, I suggest that you and your child create new puzzles for each other.
Build new knowledge from repeated patterns, wherever you find them!
Book Review: The Grapes of Math: A New Way of Counting
Summary: 5 Stars
I am currently a student at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. I read this book to a third grade student and she loved it! The Grapes of Math has wonderful bright colored pictures that are great for kids as well as rhyming which is fun for them. Each page in the book gives different math problems dealing with animals, food, and everyday objects that make it easier for kids to relate to. The book helps gives students hints on different ways of counting.Instead of counting items one by one, the book gives examples of how to group and pair items together. The pictures in the book helped my student to visualize the groupings and it made it much easier for her to figure out the problems in the book. What is also great about this book is that at the end of the book, the author gave the answers to the math problems in the book and ways to explain how to do them. I reccommed this book for elementary age students.