Mathy things

There are just too many awesome math websites for me to list right now. Vi Hart's stuff and the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives and Sheppard Math Games and a hundred other places. Wunderkind has spend hours and hours and hours and years playing math games online. And of course there's measuring things and counting money and playing Yahtzee and telling time and how many different ways can you figure out how many squares are on our living room rug, and a thousand other ways to do math in life. Oh, and Alice in Wonderland and chess and ... but I'll limit myself to math books and DVDs here.

Oh! And of course this, by They Might Be Giants. We love everything by They Might Be Giants. Everything. All of it! But this fits here, the CD/DVD combo Here Come the 123s:

Wunderkind likes the Math-U-See program, which consists of a DVD for each level showing the Math-U-See founder/teacher teaching a class of kids and writing on a whiteboard; a workbook and a teacher's manual; and base-ten blocks and other manipulatives. Each DVD has about a grade-level's worth of lessons. As soon as the first level we tried (Math-U-See Beta, roughly 2nd grade) arrived last year, he watched it all the way through -- the whole darn thing in one long go -- and he recreated the exercises with the manipulatives and his own whiteboard. Then he watched it through again several more times, but not necessarily all in one sitting. This year he did Math-U-See Gamma. He doesn't work methodically through the workbooks, 20 minutes a day (or whatever the plan is supposed to be) on a regular basis. He focuses intently when he's interested, then he gets interested in other stuff for a while, and then he goes back to the program after some time away. The program continues through Calculus, so if he stays interested in it, we'll keep moving through it. (Some of the Math-U-See curriculum offerings have a Christian focus, but the main series is secular.)

He also likes the Times Tales book for memorizing multiplication facts. (I've heard there's a Times Tales DVD now, too. But WK was happy with the book.)

Math-U-See workbooks (and the Times Tales book, and a Seussian build-it-yourself horn thing that WK calls his Super Saxoflute):

Doing the problems with the blocks and in writing, just like on the DVD:

Here are other mathy things he's enjoyed, aside from books and DVDs we've checked out of the library. Flatland: The Movie (the 2007 one with Martin Sheen as the Arthur Square) is an awesome animated flick; he drew characters from the film and acted out the story with them. It talks about shapes and two dimensions and three dimensions and even ethics and philosophy.

And Donald in Mathmagic Land is of course a classic!

G Is for Googol was recommended by a friend a few years ago and became an instant hit, and the Usborne Illustrated Elementary Math Dictionary is super fun too (and it has such pretty pictures).

He loves all the "Millions" books by David M. Schwartz. I think we saw them first on a Scholastic video that animates classic children's books.

Here are a couple other DVDs we found helpful. Not pictured are the miscellaneous workbooks I got for him (from bookstores or grocery stores or dollar stores) that he finished, or the ones I bought with high hopes that he declined to do because they were quite frankly b-o-r-i-n-g.