Complete Resource List

This book from the founder of Bedtime Math (www.bedtimemath.org) answers math questions covering a multitude of topics. It is quite helpful that the questions are organized by general topics: animals, nature, food, everyday life, Earth and space, and mental math. Some questions answered include: the number of bees needed to make a jar of honey, how fast the fastest growing tree on Earth actually grows, how many gallons of water are needed to put out a fire, and how many soccer balls would fit inside Earth. All of the math is broken down, with explanations for where those numbers came from, so it is all easy to understand. Have your child come up with their own questions and try to answer them (perhaps with some research help from you).

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An Indian village is going through a rice famine, but the greedy raja will not share his collection of rice with the villagers. Rani, a clever young girl in the village, is rewarded one day for a good deed. The raja offers her whatever she wants, and so she asks for just one grain of rice, doubled every day for 30 days. The story shows how her reward of rice quickly grows with each passing day. Children can make predictions about the amount of rice that she will have at the end of the month, and can then mark on their own calendars with the number of grains of rice Rani received on each day as the story goes on. Students can then add them all up to get the total. There is a calendar in the back of the book with each day’s total, as well as the overall total for children to check their answers. Children can find the answers either by doubling through addition, or by multiplying by two, but either way it involves some large numbers.

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Big numbers can be very difficult for kids to visualize. Adler’s book discusses these large numbers and puts them into kid-level contexts. Some examples include hairs on a head, pizzas, and city populations. The book moves through these numbers in sequential order, so you can see the numbers getting larger and larger.

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In this book, an out of control popcorn machine spurs the kids’ exploration of the powers of ten, with the help of the teacher, Professor X. The double-page cartoon-like spreads keep children engaged, and sidebars filled with numerical facts (ex: there are 40,000 different characters in the Chinese language; the oldest trees on Earth are about 2,200 years old) add interest to the story. Professor X helps the kids in the story count by powers of ten all the way up to a googol and beyond. The book also addresses misconceptions, like that there is no such thing as ‘zillion’ or ‘bajillion’, as well as offers an explanation of infinity. This is a good book for exploring place value as well as relative size of numbers. Children could be challenged to find their own number-related facts for each power of ten in the book.

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This book focuses on the Bahamas—tourism, navigation, climate, and scuba diving. There are lots of colorful photographs as well as activities and questions throughout. Measurement, large numbers, arithmetic, data, estimation, money, and graphing are all covered. 

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This book all about Canada covers arithmetic, estimation, graphs, elapsed time, and big numbers. 

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A mathematical alphabet book, it includes a range of terms, topics, and concepts, some of which include abacus, Fibonacci, probability, symmetry, and zillion. The text is clear and the cartoon illustrations are colorful, fun, and informative. This would be a good book to have around for individual exploration, or if your child wants to know more about a particular topic in mathematics. 

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This book includes a wide range of topics, ideal for individual exploration. Four sections make up the book: Where Do Numbers Come From?, Magic Numbers, Shaping Up, and The World of Math, covering topics like the history of numbers, the golden ratio, infinity, pi, square numbers, geometry, probability, chaos theory, logic, and many others. Answers to problems and riddles are in the back of the book. 

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Similar to On Beyond a Million, this book begins with one and moves up through powers of ten, building up to googol. The focus here, though, is not as much on the powers of ten themselves, but on visualizing how large the numbers really are. The colorful illustrations of things like 1,000 scoops of ice cream, 100,000 marshmallows, and 1,000,000 dollars allow children to fully visualize the size of these numbers. While children cannot be shown how big a googol is, the author does a good job of helping them imagine it. “If you counted every grain of sand on all the world’s beaches, and every drop of water in all the oceans, that wouldn’t even be close to a googol.” The last page also gives a short history of googol, what the number is and where the name came from. 

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With illustrations by Stephen Kellogg, this is a fun book with some great, detailed pictures. The book compares a million, a billion, and a trillion in the same ways—with stacking kids, counting out loud, goldfish, and stars. It is a great way for kids to visualize the enormity of the numbers as well as gain a better understanding of how much bigger one billion is compared to one million and one trillion compared to one billion. Additionally, the back of the book explains how all of the facts were calculated (ex: using the height of an average kid). This book could also potentially be a launching point for learning about scientific notation, as it is all powers of ten. 

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