New Fantasy Fiction Book by 13yo Homeschooler

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

My 13-year-old daughter just released her first book on Kindle:

  • Banished (The Riddled Stone, Book One)
    Falsely accused of stealing a magic artifact, Chris is forced to leave home, never to return. As he and three friends travel toward the border, however, they are warned of great danger approaching the land. They set out to solve an ancient riddle — but will they be able to save the kingdom, or will the quest cost them their lives?

[Update 7/6/12: The paperback book is now “In Stock” at Amazon (yay!).]

Teresa (also known as Princess Kitten) has done the NaNoWriMo Youth Program as part of her language studies for the past three years and has written many stories on her blog, but this is the first time we’ve followed through and published one of her books.

Of course I’m biased, but I think she did a pretty good job, as first books go. It’s clearly the beginning of a series, so she sets up more plot threads than she resolves — but I did convince her not to wait for this year’s NaNoWriMo to start Book Two. (I want to find out what happens next!)

Anyway, if you or your kids enjoy fantasy fiction and are interested in reading something written by a teenage homeschooler, please check out her book. She would love to get some reviews!

Book Update, and Self-Publishing Info

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

photo by Darwin Bell via flickr

As you may know, I’ve been working hard on my Let’s Play Math! books, and I’m still hoping to get at least couple of them out this summer. (Though if I keep thinking of more sections to add, I may never get them done!) I’m also finishing up the editing on my daughter’s novel and plan to release it soon.

One of the most useful resources I’ve found for self-publishing information is Joel Friedlander’s blog, The Book Designer. The last time I published my books, a dozen years ago, I made nearly every one of the mistakes he mentions in Amateur Hour Books and 5 Book Design Mistakes to Avoid.

Continue reading Book Update, and Self-Publishing Info

Update: My Math Books

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

photo by goXunuReviews via Flickr

Are you a homeschooler? Are you happy with your current curriculum, or would you like to break out of the textbook mold and explore math through “living” books and activities? Whether you hope to replace your math program or just to supplement it, I can show you ways to turn math into a learning adventure for the whole family. Your children will build a stronger foundation of understanding when you teach math as a game, playing with ideas.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote:

This blog originally grew out of my books, and now it’s coming full circle: New, expanded editions of my long-out-of-print books are ripening on the vine, growing out of the blog. To bring them to harvest, I’m going to need your help.

It has taken much longer than I had hoped to whip the manuscripts into form. My new goal is to publish ebook editions, since I will be able to sell them for about half what the original books cost twelve years ago. I’m hoping that I can finish at least a couple of the ebooks by mid-summer.

Continue reading Update: My Math Books

Used Book Price Shock

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Someone mentioned one of my old books on the Living Math forum, which made me curious how the used copies were doing at Amazon.com. These are simple little books, 100 loose pages comb-bound together. I have seen ridiculous prices before, but this one takes the cake.

Thankfully, there are a few used book dealers with more sense, or at least with more reasonable computer-automated pricing routines.

I am still at work revising (and greatly expanding) the old books so I can publish new editions. If you haven’t voted yet in my “What Do You Want from a Math Book?” survey, I’d love to hear your opinion!

“Let’s Play Math!” Blog on Facebook

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

I’m always a bit behind the times, and I don’t think I’ll ever get around to trying Twitter, but I have finally made a Facebook page. Not much there so far — a new video of one girl’s invented method for 2-digit multiplication, and a list of my games posts — but more will come over the next few weeks. Blog updates will post automatically (in theory), along with non-blog updates like that video. Above all, I’d love to answer questions from readers.

If you’re interested, please drop in for a visit.

Updated Free Math from Dover

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

If you tried to get any of the Dover samples I linked to last month, and instead you got Dover’s home page, I’m sorry! Apparently the sampler links aren’t stable. 😦 I’ve corrected most of them and deleted those I couldn’t correct, so everything works as of tonight:

I found permanent links for several of the books, but a few of them are still sampler links — especially the children’s books — and those will probably go AWOL as the others did. So if you were planning to download one of the sample pages, be advised to do it soon.

Still Time to Enter

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

You still have a few days to enter my giveaway contest for Keith Devlin’s new e-book, Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years, and his latest print book, The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution. The number of entries so far is low enough that you have very good odds of winning!

To join in the fun, just follow the instructions at this post:

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning via Mario Vittone

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Off-topic for a math blog, but vitally important:

  • Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

    Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you alright?” If they can answer at all – they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents — children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

  • It Doesn’t Have to Be Summer

    If something like that seems unlikely to you, then you’d be right. Bucket drownings don’t happen often. But when they do, the parents involved never care how rare the event is for everyone else. Something very similar to the events described above happened just last month in Indiana. There was another bucket drowning reported in Illinois the month before that.

Also worth your time:

Summer Slowdown

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

It happens this way every summer: I think that when school’s out, I’ll have time to catch up on things. But school is never out, because we’re homeschoolers — and something else always comes up to make us even more busy than normal. This year, an emergency forced dh to move his engineering office from town to home. It’s great to have him close at hand, but spring cleaning has turned into a total house reorganization to make room.

Niner's baby snapping turtle sitting on her wrist
And then Niner and Kitten adopted a couple of new pets. Here’s a picture of Niner’s new snapping turtle. The old one is getting so big he eats feeder fish by the dozen, but she plans to release him back into the creek as soon as the spring floods go down. Kitten rescued two baby birds (normally the dogs take care of wind-blown fledglings), so we have to find room for yet another cage in our menagerie.

In the meantime, this month’s Math Teachers at Play carnival is coming home to my blog, so I’d better get to work on that. If you would like to share a blog post about learning, teaching, or just playing around with math, I’d love to have you send it in. Just click here and fill out the handy automatic submission form.

Update, July 2011: Niner wrote a blog post on the turtles, with photos. Kitten had one of her babies die (sad!) but the other grew up enough to be released into the woods across the creek.

Working on My Let’s Play Math! Books

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
Workplace stress caused by an unsuitable work ...
Image via Wikipedia

This blog originally grew out of my books, and now it’s coming full circle: New, expanded editions of my long-out-of-print books are ripening on the vine, growing out of the blog. To bring them to harvest, I’m going to need your help.

The Books

I’m working on the games books first because I think they will be the most helpful supplements to any math program.

  • Let’s Play Math! Number Games for All Ages
    This book will include games like Tens Concentration and Hit Me, as well as tips for teaching negative numbers, the times table, and more. Never before published, because it was planned as the fifth book in my earlier how-to-teach-homeschool-math series, but my self-publishing experiment ended after book four.
  • Others to be announced, if I ever get the first two done…

Continue reading Working on My Let’s Play Math! Books