Math Magic for Your Kids: Hundreds of Games and Exercises from the Human Calculator to Make Math Fun and Easy

In Math Magic, his New York Times bestseller, Scoff Flansburg demonstrated his universal ability to make math fun and easy for adults. Now in Math Magic for Your Kids, the Human Calculator does the same for elementary school children.

Measuring flour for a birthday cake, setting the dinner table, counting change — learning these simple skills daunts millions of children. And helping them along can be frustrating for parents. In Math Magic for Your Kids, Scott Flansburg comes to the rescue. With entertaining games and tricks, this proven method helps kids develop a positive attitude about numbers, the necessary foundation on which they will build math skills for the rest of their education. Children will discover hours of independent amusement, while parents will find activities they can do with their children to supplement their schoolwork and to help them get better grades, including:

• Innovative counting exercises that teach addition and subtraction
• Writing activities that reinforce math concepts
• Shortcut methods that provide "magic tricks" for learning math skills
• Riddles and puzzles that activate logic and math basics
• Games and drills that introduce and perfect multiplication and division

Library Journal

This book, whose author (Mathmagic: The Human Calculator, LJ 5/15/93) may be a familiar face from his TV infomercials, is supposed to be used by parents to help elementary school children master arithmetic with whole numbers from one to 12. Yet it is hard to imagine any parent actually making it to the end of this exercise, as it plods through the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of each individual number, one at a time, using extremely repetitious cartoon illustrations to take up space along the way. Flansburg's nave pedagogy doesn't seem more imaginative or encouraging than the type of exercises found in ordinary textbooks. The presentation is jumbled, and some of the instructions seem poorly thought out, as when he illustrates division with a picture of two shoes divided by two other shoes (it may make sense for addition, but how do you divide shoes into each other?) or suggests as an activity: "Take your children to the library and introduce them to the stories of Washington Irving" (what does that have to do with math?). Not recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/96.]-Amy Brunvand, Univ. of Utah Lib., Salt Lake City