Math Recommendations

readbookMost resources that public school advisers suggest for gifted or bright kids are a ‘mile wide and an inch deep’ – they don’t really go into depth on any one area. After traveling to dozens of home school conventions for several years across the country and seeing what math options are out there, I searched for more options than what’s traditionally on the exhibit floor.

After talking with math professors from Harvey Mudd, Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, and others, I thought you might like to know about their recommendations for resources that might be useful to you on how to deliver math skills in a way that really lasts.

For kids just starting out with Math: Dr. Wright’s Kitchen Table Math

For kids not quite ready for Algebra: Singapore Math Series

For kids Algebra through Calculus: Art of Problem Solving

These two work well together, and lead right into each other. If you’re looking for a DVD series, then you’ll want to get Arthur Benjamin’s 24-lecture ‘Joy of Mathematics’ DVDs.

More Math Resources

These resources are for kids that are really into math and enjoy diving deep:

  • Go Figure A totally cool book about numbers that my kids love to read in carpool.
  • Why Pi? is the second book that builds more on the ideas from Go Figure
  • Story of Math is a 2-volume DVD set you can find at your library that focuses on how and why math was developed and the current ideas about who discovered what and when.
  • Fractals – Hunting the Hidden Dimension This is a Nova documentary you can find at the library which has enough plain-English for everyone. By the way, fractals are fragmented geometric shapes split into parts, each of which is approximately a reduced-size copy of the whole thing. Fractals are between dimension 2 and 3, depending on their depth.
  • Games for Math – this book is a treasure-trove of math games you can make out of papers, scissors, and a little time. We’ve done a lot of these with our kids when they were in K-2nd grade. Find it at your library so you can browse through it yourself.
  • Ten Marks A math curriculum that’s aligned with state standards.