Beyond Facts & Flashcards: Exploring Math with Your Kids

This engaging book is a welcome source of inspiration for parents seeking to promote "numeracy" or "math literacy" in their children. The author makes a persuasive case for shifting our emphasis in math education from the memorization of definitions and procedures to hands-on exploration of mathematical concepts through solving problems that are meaningful to children. The heart of the book is the suggestions for parents to "do math" with their children through an approach analogous to that described in the now-widely accepted literature on the benefits of parents reading to children. The author suggests specific activities for exploring math as a family, broken down by elementary school grade level. Some of the recommended activities, such as ways to adapt board games to explore different concepts, are appealing and easily implemented. Others are not. In her--often charming and infectious--missionary zeal for her subject, Mokros underestimates just how much like medicine graphing, charting, mapping and planning activities can be to the unwashed, semi-innumerate masses among which I count myself. For non-math lovers, there is no way that snuggling up to do math together is going to compete with a bedtime story. Many of the activities recommended for kindergartners were too sophisticated. Presumably, a 5-year-old who can handle these activities is being reared by parents who already have nurtured their young one's math literacy and do not need this book. For the rest of us, there is still much of value in this book and the author's upbeat style does make the math-medicine go down in a slightly more delightful way.