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Good science books home
Titles by age
Preschool
Ages 5 to 8
Ages 8 to 11
Ages 11+
MATHEMATICS
Preschool | Ages 5 to 8 | Ages 8 to 11
365 penguins
Fromental, Jean-Luc and Joëlle Jolivet (Abrams books for Young Readers, 2006, unpaged)
This large format, four-colour picture book tells the amusing story of a family which receives by courier a penguin a day for a year. However apart from the humorous storyline, the young reader is introduced to basic mathematical operations. When the numbers of penguins are added, they are arranged in groups (“12 boxes of 12 penguins = ??”) and their food requirements are calculated. By the end of the book, readers have discovered who is clandestinely sending the birds, why and some basic facts about penguins. However the strength of the book is in its plot and mathematical concepts.
(MATHEMATICS; ANIMALS)
Sorting
Pluckrose, Henry (Know About Series, Franklin Watts, 1988, 32pp.)
The brief text has questions which will start
a child thinking about different ways in which objects can be
sorted – by size, colour, type (toy animals or buttons). It introduces set theory by showing how things can be sorted into different sets. Chris Fairclough's clear, well composed colour photographs expand the text and illustrate each point specifically.
Capacity by the same team (also published 1988) starts the child thinking about how much liquid or marbles a jar holds, and how to compare them, and leads to our standard measure of volume, the litre. Weight (1987) introduces the concept of weight, and how to weigh things.
(MATHEMATICS)
Anno's mysterious multiplying jar
Anno, Mitsumasa and Masaichiro (Bodley Head, 1982, 44pp.)
Inside the jar was water which became a sea, in which there was one island, and on the island were two countries, and in each country there were three mountains.... This story is at first presented with pictures, but then is retold with a dot representing each of the objects, and with the mathematical equation shown (2 x 1 = 2, and so on). This is an effective way of showing how big numbers can become, as the number of dots will not fit on the pages before we get to the ten jars in each box.
(MATHEMATICS)
Numbers
Parker, Steve (Macdonald Young Books, Science Works!, 1995, 46pp.)
One of the best features of this book is the excellent introduction to the book itself – how it is laid out, the contents of the different sections and what the different colour-coded panels contain. This makes the following pages easy to follow and enables the reader to jump straight to sections which may interest them such as the Special FX or DIY Science panels. The overall coverage is not just an introduction to numbers and mathematics but a fascinating conglomerate of facts, activities and curiosities.
(MATHEMATICS)
Numbers: The key to the universe
Poskitt, Kjartan (Murderous Maths, Scholastic, 2002, 192pp.)
In a down to earth (or should we say out in space?) informal style, this book introduces Fibonacci numbers, things you can do with squares and cubes, prime numbers, numbering systems with different bases, and many other intriguing but useless things you can do with numbers. The humour and line drawings by Philip Reeve will draw in many children who enjoy playing with numbers at the older end of this age range. With a table of contents but no index, books in this series are designed to be read for enjoyment rather than be used for research.
With similar earthy humour (guaranteed no sums), Vicious circles, and other savage shapes explores the characteristics of circles, triangles and polygons and concludes with a proof of Pythagorus' theorum done as a court trial of a revived Pythagorus. Algebra and the phantom X introduces algebra and shows how it can be used to solve problems such as the price of arrows and cannonballs and to prove how some card tricks work. The humour and cartoon drawing will engage children previously turned off by the idea of maths.
(MATHEMATICS)
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