You Can Count on Monsters: The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters

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Overview

Using a unique teaching tool designed to motivate kids to learn, this volume visually explores the concepts of factoring and the role of prime and composite numbers. The playful and colorful monsters are designed to give children (and even older audiences) an intuitive understanding of the building blocks of numbers and the basics of multiplication. The introduction and appendices can also help adult readers answer questions about factoring from their young audience. The artwork is crisp and creative and the ...
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You Can Count on Monsters: The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters

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More About This Book

Overview

Using a unique teaching tool designed to motivate kids to learn, this volume visually explores the concepts of factoring and the role of prime and composite numbers. The playful and colorful monsters are designed to give children (and even older audiences) an intuitive understanding of the building blocks of numbers and the basics of multiplication. The introduction and appendices can also help adult readers answer questions about factoring from their young audience. The artwork is crisp and creative and the colors are bright and engaging, making this volume a welcome deviation from standard math texts.

CRC Press Author and NPR's Math Guy Keith Devlin spoke with Scott Simon about how the book makes finding prime numbers fun.

"This is one of the most amazing math books for kids I have ever seen…," Devlin says. "Great colors, it's wonderful, and yet because [Schwartz] knows the mathematics, he very skillfully and subtly embeds mathematical ideas into the drawings."

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Editorial Reviews

School Library Journal
Gr 4–8—This hybrid math/art book is both ambitious and imaginative. An introductory section explains the colored-dot configurations and factor trees for numbers 1 to 100, which appear on the verso of each spread. These factor trees are "all the way grown out" to the lowest common factors, or prime numbers. On the opposite page is a monster scene that represents the number. Schwartz has created a creature for each prime number: "Each monster has something about it that relates to its number, but sometimes you have to look hard (and count) to find it." Thus, the monster for 5 is a five-featured, five-pointed star, and the 13 monster sports a pink-and-white eye-patch with 13 segments. The illustration for 14 is a "7" monster eating a "2" monster. The "78" picture includes monsters representing 2, 3, and 13, the prime factors of that number. The pages are glossy black with flat, colorful abstractions. The author's claim, "The only thing you really need to know in order to enjoy this book is how to multiply whole numbers together, like 2 and 3," is an understatement; readers will need patience and an open, undaunted mind to deconstruct the monster scenes. This is a book for math lovers who want to have some fun. Challenge these students to create their own prime monsters and combinations. While the dot configurations and factor trees are less inventive, they provide a more concrete explanation of the math for the rest of us.—Barbara Auerbach, PS 217, Brooklyn, New York
Publishers Weekly
This compact, innovative book counts to 100 using prime numbers represented as “monsters,” each with identifying characteristics (two resembles a bee with two buggy eyes, and three is an angry-looking triangular creature). The book opens with explanations of multiplication, prime and composite numbers, and factor trees, then moves on to a list of numbers. Each prime number looks unique, while composite numbers are represented by scenes involving their prime monsters (eight is illustrated as three of the beelike twos, i.e., two times two times two. Readers may have difficulty deciphering the pictures, which come to resemble little works of abstract geometric art. But especially for creative learners, visualizing the roles each monster plays may lead to deeper number sense. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781568815787
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • Publication date: 1/23/2010
  • Pages: 244
  • Sales rank: 271,458
  • Age range: 4 - 8 Years
  • Product dimensions: 7.30 (w) x 7.20 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Richard Schwartz grew up in Los Angeles. He wore only blue clothes between the ages of 7 and 11. He spent his youth obsessively playing tennis until video games distracted him. He majored in math at UCLA, got a Ph.D in math from Princeton and is currently a professor at Brown University, with research interests in geometry, topology, and dynamics.He likes to do mathematical experiments on the computer and then find proofs for the results he discovers. Rich was an Invited Speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2003, and a Clay Research Scholar in 2009. He is the author of a number of books, including Spherical CR Geometry and Dehn Surgery, Outer Billiards on Kites, Man Versus Dog, and The Extra Toaster, among others. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Barrington, Rhode Island. In his spare time, he listens to music, writes comic books, thinks about future technologies, cycles on the bike path near his house, walks on the beach, or plays with his children.

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Sort by: Showing all of 6 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 5, 2012

    Great for visual learners

    We bought this book based on a recommendation from our son's math teacher. It is great -- starts out simple and gradually gets more complex. Our son is in 3rd grade, but taking accelerated 6th grade math. He is a visual math kid and this book is composed of pictures and equations explaining the picture. So it is a great book for him.

    This book would be better if answers were under a flap, on the back side of each page rather than to the left, or not readily accessible but not visible (so that the kid has to think thru the answer). Perhaps flash cards?

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted June 23, 2011

    A must for your classroom library and coffee table!

    "You Can Count on Monsters" is a delightful teaching tool that plays to multiple intelligences and is conducive to cross-curricular collaborations between art and mathematics. This book is a great way to introduce the concepts of prime numbers, factor trees, and multiplication in terms of sets. The approach is fresh and creative and will perhaps make math a little bit less intimidating for students. I can definitely see potential for multi-sensory classroom art projects such as factor tree collages and hands on mosaic depictions (using milk bottle caps or soda caps) to create sets using the book for inspiration. In addition to being a great curricular enhancement, this book will serve as an excellent coffee table book, as the pictures are interesting, modern, and playful.

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  • Posted June 3, 2011

    Great book for Kids!

    I bought this book for my niece and she will not put it down. I am sure the colorful, thick pages help with the 'scary' monsters on them, but she loves to show me new things she has learned from it. Like that it only takes 5 and 13 to make the '65 Monster.' It really is great to see a 9 year old girl get so excited over a math book about factoring.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 3, 2011

    One-of-a-kind and fun to read!

    Heard the high praise for this little book on NPR by Keith Devlin of Stanford University and NPR's "Math Guy" - great book for kids and adults needing a refresher on math multiplication and factorial trees. Really does make math interesting for kids (and parents too who aren't quite sure how to help with homework questions).

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  • Posted February 26, 2011

    Awesome for people that understand math

    This is not really a learn to count book, but a pictorial representation of numerical properties. If you understand math and want your kid to as well, this is a fun book. To Granny FL... I was doing long division and multiplication at age 3-4 along with the other kids in my Montessori school. Now my kid can too!

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  • Posted February 25, 2011

    Save your money!

    This book is neither about counting nor monsters. It purports to teach multiplication to 3-to-6 year olds! An egregious misnomer in both titling and content.

    The nerve!

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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