If you want to know more about my playful math books, check out my new author page. You can post comments or send me a message. I’d love to hear from you!
Visit Denise Gaskins on Facebook
You can also join the Playful Family Math discussion group or find plenty of online mathy goodness at my original Let’s Play Math Facebook page.
🙂 See you there!
Tabletop Academy Press just posted new and improved wholesale discounts on my math paperback books. For details, click here to see our Booksellers page.
It’s here! My long-awaited upper-elementary Math You Can Play games book has finally hit the online bookstores.
Multiplication & Fractions features 25 kid-tested games, offering a variety of challenges for school-age students. Children master several math models that provide a sturdy foundation for understanding multiplication and fractions. The games feature times table facts and more advanced concepts such as division, fractions, decimals, and multistep mental math.
Click here to find Multiplication & Fractions at your favorite bookstore.
Maybe you never really understood what multiplication means or what fractions are? As long as you start with an open mind and are willing to engage playfully, the activities in the book can help you as you help your kids.
Anecdotally, these two areas are the first major stumbling point for students in their math studies. The sequencing in the book will help kids develop a strong foundation.
Kids (and parents!) find these games fun. I’ve been field testing math games for the last 18 months and keep seeing how engaged kids get when playing math games.— Joshua Greene
Multiplication & Fractions Math Games from Denise Gaskins (a review)
Chapters include:
If you are a parent, these games provide opportunities to enjoy quality time with your children. If you are a classroom teacher, use the games as warm-ups and learning center activities or for a relaxing review day at the end of a term. If you are a tutor or homeschooler, make games a regular feature in your lesson plans to build your students’ mental math skills.
So what are you waiting for? Clear off a table, grab a deck of cards, and let’s play some math!
It starts with models that are visual explanations of the concepts. Gaskins also breaks learning these concepts into comfortable steps that emphasize patterns and relationships, the real ideas that are behind properly understanding multiplication and fractions (indeed, math generally).
The sequence of games in each section starts by building familiarity and then fluency (speed) to solidify all of that work.— Joshua Greene
Multiplication & Fractions Math Games from Denise Gaskins (a review)
Most of the Math You Can Play games use materials you already have around the house, such as playing cards or dice. But this book introduces multiplication and fractions with several games using two special mathematical model card decks.
Click here to download the Multiplication & Fraction Printables, featuring all the math model cards, hundred charts, and game boards you will need for any game in the book.
One step closer to getting my long-awaited Multiplication & Fraction Games book out — I finished the printables file! At least, I hope I’ve finished. Sometimes it seems like whack-a-typo never ends…
Click here to download the Multiplication & Fraction Printables, featuring mathematical model cards, hundred charts, and game boards to accompany the upcoming Math You Can Play: Multiplication & Fractions book.
The Multiplication & Fractions ebook will come out sometime in November, and the paperback should follow in time for Christmas. If you’re interested, my newsletter subscribers will get a special introductory sale price whenever the book is published. Join now!
You may also want to check out:
Click here to download the Number Game Printables Pack, featuring hundred charts, graph paper, and game boards from the first two Math You Can Play books.
Also, 0–99 charts, and bottoms-up versions, too. (See my blog post Math Debates with a Hundred Chart.) And a fun cut-and-fold game board for playing Shut the Box.
You have permission to copy and use these game boards and worksheets in your own local classroom, home school, math circle, co-op class, etc. But you may not post them on your own website (though you can link to this post, if you like) or sell them. If you’re not sure how copyright works on the Internet, check out Daniel Scocco’s Copyright Law: 12 Dos and Don’ts.
If you’re interested in helping children learn math, I have special offer just for you:
The 42 kid-tested games are simple to learn, quick to play, and require minimal preparation. Most use common household items such as cards or dice.
“Although the cover says games for young learners, the beauty of this book is that most of the games can easily be scaled up for older kids, teens, and even adults. My youngest is four and my oldest is 14, and I will be pulling games for all of them out of this book!
“I appreciate that most of the games are low floor, high ceiling – easy for a child to access, but can be played at a higher level through strategy or slight alterations to the rules. These are not drills disguised as games, but activities that require problem solving and strategy as well as calculation.”
Continue reading Math You Can Play Combo in Paperback and Ebook
Bookselling stats rise and fall like a roller-coaster, but the top of the curve is always fun. Today Let’s Play Math hit the Top Ten in homeschooling (“parent participation in education”) at Amazon.com:
I noticed the “STEM Education” category at Amazon, so I updated my book’s keywords. And the Let’s Play Math paperback zipped into the Top 25!
“It’s done? Yay! Now we can have Math Club again!”
— from a 3rd-grade boy who didn’t appreciate me taking a year off to finish and format the book
There’s still time to enter the book giveaway at Our Home on the Range blog:
Here on the Range, I’m determined to establish an environment where math is not just numbers and answers. I firmly believe my children can learn all the math they want, when they’re ready, as long as they don’t convince themselves they can’t learn it, they don’t like it, or that it’s too hard. To reach this goal, math must be a regular part of our lives in a way that encourages conversation and exploration.
- Let’s Play Math could be the very introduction a young family needs as they contemplate the first few years of homeschooling. First Son’s early years may have been completely different if I had read this book when he was five.
- It could be a fantastic book for a family with a child that’s struggling (in homeschool or otherwise) with math. A few years ago, when First Son first showed signs of a potentially life-long hatred of all things numerical, reading this book may have helped me adapt the curriculum we were then using to meet his needs and enrich him. (We ended up switching and I’m happy with that, but I could have avoided quite a bit of angst.)
- This book would be perfect for a parent who has always struggled with inadequacies in math or for someone like me, who always did just fine in math but never understood the claims of math’s beauty or fascination. I find myself excited to explore some of the resources the author has gathered together for my own growth and new challenges.
—Kansas Mom
Advance review comments for Let’s Play Math: How Families Can Learn Math Together—and Enjoy It:
Want to help your kids with math? Don’t help with the homework. Get them to engage with math by doing things together — many of which don’t even look like math. Let’s Play Math is charming, intelligent, and practical; full of family fun and sound advice.
—Ian Stewart, author of Professor Stewart’s Casebook of Mathematical Mysteries
This book is well researched, well annotated, and includes loads of activities you can try with kids K-12 at home.
—Jennifer Bardsley, credentialed teacher and author of TeachingMyBabytoRead.com
This is the math helper I wish I’d had years ago.
—Anne White, author of Minds More Awake
A crash course in how to enjoy math with your children! Denise Gaskins uses her years of experience to show parents how to teach math with games, stories, puzzles, manipulatives, and living books. Full of useful advice and pedagogical insight, this book is a treasure trove for parents who want to help their children appreciate the beauty, history, and fun of math but don’t know where to start.
—Kate Snow, KatesHomeschoolMath.com and author of Preschool Math at Home
Buy now:
More details about the book:
I love how seeing math as a playful game can help even the busiest parents enjoy learning alongside their children.
My math books grew from more than a quarter-century of playing math with children — my own and those of our friends — at my house, at the library, in the park, and in group workshops. The kids and I learned from each other as we shared the adventure of learning mathematics.
Now that the publication dust has settled and the typos and formatting glitches have been sorted out, I’ve updated all the Let’s Play Math ebook files to match my shiny new, greatly expanded paperback edition.
If your version shows the family playing together on the cover, then you’re all set. The copyright notice should say “Ebook version 3.0.”
But if you have an earlier edition of Let’s Play Math, you will probably want to update to this new, revised edition. Be warned: this is a totally new file, so you’ll lose all your highlights and bookmarks. But the expanded version has SO many wonderful changes, believe me, it’s well worth the inconvenience.
The following instructions are for Amazon.com. If you bought your book somewhere else, check the book dealer’s webpage — if the new cover (above) is showing, then they have the updated file. Find the Customer Service section of their website and follow their procedure.
I’ve asked Amazon to release the new ebook files to everyone who bought the earlier edition — as used to be their standard policy. But they’ve had too many complaints about people losing their bookmarks, so they no longer issue updates except by customer request.
The only way to get the updated file is to contact Customer Service and ask for it yourself.
Step by step instructions:
I bought the ebook Let's Play Math (ASIN B0095POAX4). This book has recently been updated with new material. Would you please send the updated ebook files to my account? Thank you.And then wait for the support people to do their magic. You should get the new file within 24 hours.
What if you got a bad copy of a paperback book?
The machines that print POD (Print On Demand) books — like my math book or my daughter’s fantasy novels — are basically giant computer printers. As everyone knows, printers get glitches. And the humans who take a book off the machine and put it in a shipping box won’t necessarily notice the mistake.
If you ever get a messed-up copy of my math paperbacks (or any book by anyone, for that matter), you can always contact customer service to have it replaced.
Just follow the same steps as above, but choose the options that make sense for whatever complaint you have. Or if you didn’t buy from Amazon, then find the Customer Service section for whatever book dealer you used, and follow their procedure.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 