Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1031434 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 40 pages

Customer Reviews

Disappointed reader.
I am a secondary maths teacher, I knew the book was aimed at primary school but I thought it might be something I could use with my S.E.N. classes. From the other reviews about this book I it sounded like a really interesting read and fun. I was really disappointed, I would hardly call the exercises 'riddles'. Basically it's just describing how to group items together to make them easier to count, rather than counting each individual item. But every page is the same, and it gets boring.
The book is nicely presented and colourful, the poems are cute but there are definately no riddles in this book. For very young children only, and I think it would be better used in a one to one situation rather than with a class of children.

Quick Counts Build Confidence and Interest in Arithmetic!
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!

it's a basically a count-the-objects book, albeit with suggestions how to count quicker by multiplying rows etc
i agree with the other reviewer who says that there is not a lot to this book, no real riddles-
it's just page after page of different groups of things to count, with suggestions how to count quicker by multiplying rows of the same number etc, rather than count them one by one- saying
"Please don't count them, it's too slow, This hot pie was made to go!/ Let me give you some advice, Just do half and count it twice,"
and to "look askew" to see patterns to count, and to look for different patterns: "Instead of seeing groups of threes,/ Count by fives and it's a breeze!"
- Like the postive reviewer says, it is a good tool to learn, so it is useful in that way, and this book provides a number of pages of objects to practice with- so it may be exactly what someone else is looking for.

i just don't feel i really needed this book to teach it- like the other reviewer says, its easy to set out patterns like this yourself-

perhaps i would be happier with it as part of a book about maths, such as a workbook teaching different kind of aspects of maths, rather than just having a book only concentrating on just this counting things (albeit using multiplications techniques)-
we have a similar exercise in a 'brain game' on the ipod too, so we have it there.

i'd have probably liked it more too if it hadn't been described as 'maths riddles', that means i was disappointed, as i wouldn't call counting fish, mushrooms etc a riddle-
if it said 'learn how to count quickly! find groups within the many numbers, and use multiplication to find how many objects are in each pictures...a new way to count! lots of different objects to count on each 2 page spread exercises'
and then, if i had decided to buy it, then at least i'd know what i was getting....
there are so many excellent maths books out now though, that teach maths as part of stories, 'Sir Cumference and the round table' to 'Odd Todd and Even Steven' to the 'dragon of pi', which make maths so enjoyable, i hope there continues to be many more.

of course, a child who knows basic times tables are at most to benefit from this book - to times a number of rows by three, or by two, or five, requires some good knowledge of time tables really.....