Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 25
 Great for the Early Grades! July 13, 2001
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I sought out this book hoping to find material for my fifth grade classroom. I found the book to be better suited for grades 2-4. My students would probably have been interested in the puzzles, but I found it to be just that, a fun book for my students, not a book that I could really build a lesson around. I suppose I could have discussed different strategies for looking at problems, but that would have been about it. If you are looking for lesson material try checking out something by Theoni Pappas instead!
Great for the Early Grades! July 13, 2001
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
I sought out this book hoping to find material for my fifth grade classroom. I found the book to be better suited for grades 2-4. My students would probably have been interested in the puzzles, but I found it to be just that, a fun book for my students, not a book that I could really build a lesson around. I suppose I could have discussed different strategies for looking at problems, but that would have been about it. If you are looking for lesson material try checking out something by Theoni Pappas instead!
 Quick Counts Build Confidence and Interest in Arithmetic! April 12, 2001
Professor Donald Mitchell (Boston)
45 out of 46 found this review helpful
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!
More Math Please... February 2, 2001
Roz Levine (Virginia)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
Greg Tang and Harry Briggs have taken the stuffiness and boredom out of math with their very creative and inventive book, The Grapes of Math: Mind Stretching Math Riddles. Word problems, told in rhyme with hints to help with solutions, combined with detailed, vibrant illustrations, challenge youngsters to look at old counting problems in new ways. Instead of formulas and memorization, Tang and Briggs show kids to think in innovative ways. Techniques include looking for patterns, regrouping numbers, combining multiples and subtracting first, in order to add. With an answer key and easy to understand, common sense explanations at the end of the book, kids 6-10 won't even know they're solving math problems. They'll think they're just having FUN!
Yes! Math is FUN! January 24, 2001
James S. Kinkead (Furlong, PA USA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book delivers as advertised. The riddles are clever. On each page, you are supposed to count a certain item within an illustration. The riddles give hints as to how to count them the easiest way. Each page has it's own problem. A clear answer key/diagram is in the back of the book. Some knowledge of multiplication is necessary. But a child just beginning to multiply could see the benefits of learning their times tables so that they could solve the riddles in the Grapes of Math.
Showing reviews 21-25 of 25
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