Customer Reviews

Anno's Math Games 2

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I find the review from the library journal really silly. Most preschoolers really can understand and follow this book, when read to them by a caring adult. It is one of the best examples of Mitsumasa Anno's pure love of mathematics shining through. I recommend being there to read it to your child, so you can experience the joy for yourself. I have tutored otherwise very good students having trouble in algebra, and it is obvious that this type of visualizing and reasoning and exploring was missing all along in the school curriculum, which means they were never prepared for abstract thinking. Don't depend on the school to give your children the tools they need. Here is the missing link. These are some basic unifying basic ideas of mathematics that everything else will build on. The first chapter is all about understand operations, that some can be reversed and others can't. Later chapters explore how numbers represent our world, our decimal counting system, and how to measure quantities that are uncountable. All of this is done visually. If you have a number of real objects, you can draw them to represent them, then you can draw them simpler and simpler until they are just circles, and then you can represent those circles with numbers. It is genius, taking what adults take for granted as intuitive, and breaking it down into simple magical steps, which were truly the first ones we took to real understanding. Yes, it was that easy, and yet not all children come to it easily. If only there were more books like this one! Too bad it is out of print now. Get it from your local public library if you need to.