Discovering Patterns

Children's Literature - Judy Katsh

This book means well and it is colorful and visually appealing. The subtitle hints at the problem in this "Math for Fun" series, though. What ARE projects for games? Well, here they appear to be activities. Most are well-meaning attempts to take arithmetic out of the textbook and into real life; or at least into interesting artificial reality. The problem is the activities are poorly described both in terms of what readers are supposed to do and what learning outcomes will be achieved if they do. The activities are supposedly color-coded according to difficulty level but that signal is also not clearly presented. However, families who enjoy math and enjoy figuring things out together may find these books a useful springboard to their own investigations and activities to explore patterns in nature.