Customer Reviews

225 Fantastic Facts Math Word Problems: Amazing Facts and Quick Companion Word Problems That Build Skills in Multiplication, Division, Fractions, Decimals, Percentages, and More

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I got this book and I've never seen my children so interested in solving math problems. The reward of finding out some trivia at the end of the problem seemed to work wonders.

Now that they are done with it I make up problems for them to solve based on facts I find.

Bring on Volume 2!

Using this book is one of the very best ways I have found to review and teach math facts. Any level of math can be reviewed in the same time frame. Excellent for facts application, recall accuracy, and problem solving speed. You only need to give 2-3 problems a day. Consistence is the key, a little everyday. I also like Beestar (an excellent web site with free weekly math practice at www.beestar.org). They both let kids use and enforce their math skills daily while having fun. Highly recommend.

I am not a math teacher, but our district has "Math Day" once a year. All teachers teach a math unit on that day. I was able to use this book to make my activity "Math Around the World" because it had fantastic facts about things on many continents. The students were fascinated, and enjoyed finding out how thick the ice was at Antarctica, how long the Statue of Liberty's nose was, etc. High interest, good variety, and provides good daily math problems.

I bought this book for my eight-year-old and she likes it very much. On our first look through the book, however, I found a question that was wildly incorrect, and a look through the answer key located another that's questionable at best.

Exhibit A: Question 43 seeks the number of decibels in the loudest whale pulse, which turns out to be 188 dB. The "hint" says the whale pulse is "2 times as loud" as a 94 dB stadium crowd, intending the child to multiply by two. But decibels are a logarithmic scale, meaning that the hint would lead someone with knowledge of decibels to an answer of 97 dB. This is not a subtle error -- it is a huge error. 188 decibels has 2.5 BILLION TIMES the strength of a 94 decibel sound, not "2 times" the strength.

Exhibit B: Question 215 wonders how hot the surface of Venus is, and asks students to add temperatures to get there. You don't and can't add temperatures (78 in San Diego, 62 in Wichita, 40 in Cleveland). It's not valid. Not that any student would, but if you converted to Celsius, added your answers, and converted back to Fahrenheit, you would get a completely different answer, because temperature isn't additive. For the record, neither can you multiply temperatures (except perhaps in Kelvin): what would it even mean to say a 64 degree day is "twice as warm" as a 32 degree day?

I know that I'm nitpicking. The interesting answers, which seem to all be correct, get students to do math. But much more care should have been put into the hints. If you understand science, these things will irk you; if not, hakuna matata, I suppose.

This book is really helpful especially if you are building a personal resource library.