Living Math Books: Coming to A Homeschool Near Me!!

I've heard of living books for history, but living books for math!? 

YES, please! 

I feel like we've been missing out...spending too much time on repetitive, mind numbing math. I knew we could teach history with living books, but how have I missed this fabulous way of teaching math?

Don't get me wrong, Saxon math is a very good curriculum...but for us the repetition was mind numbing for us. Doing the same thing over and over each day just with different numbers.

On a whim I decided to look up math books at our library. First, I searched to see if they had Life of Fred books...they don't...then, I noticed a whole list of math minded story books!

SAY WHAAAAT?

I had to know more. So, after my eldest son's woodworking class we headed to the library so that we I could look at these magical books. (My kids didn't give a hoot about what books I was interested in getting, they just wanted to play on the computers. *eyeroll*)

The first one I grabbed off the shelf and glanced at had me hooked! I scooped all of the children's math story books that were on the shelf...and promptly checked out 99% of them.

After we for home the kids wanted nothing to do with them. So I set the glorious books on the table and left them alone. I didn't want to force my children to read them...I wanted them to forget about them. I wanted them to forget the theme of today's library trip.

So, about an hour or so later while my oldest was using Xtramath and my 18mo was napping...so I decided to read a book to my daughter.(Sorting Through Spring, by Lizann Flatt) She wasn't too excited but she saw the cover of the book and was intrigued by the baby bird on the front.

She had NO idea it was actually a math book. We started reading and talking about rhythm, patterns, skip counting, and graphs. About half way through the story it asked her to make a graph, which she eagerly completed!

There wasn't a single complaint about why we had to do math! Who is this child? We sat on the couch side by side reading the book, talking about the patterns, thinking up a rhythm for raindrops, graphing frogs. I'm pretty sure she remembers more about this 'math' lesson than her last few lesson of Saxon math!

She wasn't thinking about how boring math was. She was thinking about the book, what we were reading, and just having a good time with her mama...LEARNING MATH!

I can not wait to continue using living math books in our homeschool.

Do you use living math books? Which ones are your favorite?

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