All age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
Category: Education
Daddy Mojo used to teach. Being an ex educator he’s interested in many things about education, such as teaching policies, best practices and bureaucracy.
The problem with history textbooks is that they don’t put things into a conversational tone that makes kids curious. They do have photographs and illustrations but the text blurbs are usually quite short and just like Jack Webb or J. Jonah Jameson, they list just the facts. Sometimes they follow up every other page with a thinking activity or series of questions that students will leave blank or fill out with incomplete sentences when asked to answer them by the teacher. Big Ideas from History is an intelligent reference book that looks at integral chapters in history, like evolution, the start of religion, the ends of civilizations, science, and many more big concept issues.
I love books like A Curious Collection of Dangerous Creatures, An Illustrated Encyclopedia. It’s an entertaining reference book with dozens of critters that I hope to never encounter and that students are intrigued by. This is the sort of book that will hook mid to upper-elementary school students who have caught the ‘animal bug’ and need to do those first essays. As a saving grace to those educators who have to read or listen to those essays, A Curious Collection of Dangerous Creatures has multiple dozens of them that they haven’t heard of before. The odds of having your educator’s eyes gloss over because you’ve heard about the Brazilian Death Beetle one too many times.
In my office, I’ve got a very small shelf that I affectionately call the best books that I never reviewed. Why didn’t I review them? Sometimes my schedule just got too busy, the new release got to be not so new or I just completely forgot. The Constitution Decoded: A Guide to the Document That Shapes Our Nation by Katie Kennedy is one of the books on that shelf. This is a reference book that presents the Constitution of the United States of America in a way that makes it entertaining and teachable, without diluting the content or presenting it in an intimidating manner. The Presidents Decoded: A Guide to the Leaders Who Shaped Our Nation is cut from the same cloth and delivers similar, but not an identical level of enjoyment.
When learning another language, full immersion is the absolute best way to do so, if that’s an option. Depending on your age it certainly can be more confusing, but the results will happen quicker, once your brain stops trying to fight the process. This is where children’s books in a second language can be a very important learning tool. El Dia Del Agua is an illustrated book that exemplifies that fact. It’s 100% in Spanish and provides Spanish language learners the opportunity to practice their pronunciation, inferential clues, and grammar.
There are some books and some publishers that are impossible to resist for elementary school readers. These are the types of books that operate like a friendly, education-based Venus Flytrap. Kids will open the book to any page, be curious or entertained about what they see, and then thumb forward or backward to dig into more of the book. The book’s title, Please Don’t Bite Me! also entices kids to open it up. Instead of asking a question, it posits something in the form of a statement. What could be biting me? It’ll probably hurt, I sure hope this thing doesn’t bite me. Is this biting thing something that’s poisonous?
The biggest and smallest are the population of most elementary school essays. Meet the Megafauna! is the sort of illustrated book that feeds the soul of elementary school students that attracted to extremes. Most of the time it will be boys who want to read about the biggest, extinct creature and then proceed to do a three-minute report on them to class. There are other ways for educators to use Meet the Megafauna!, but they do require a bit more panache.
I taught fifth-grade science for a bit one year and the content in What’s Wild Outside Your Door? is cut from the same cloth as many of those lessons. There’s a paragraph about the food web. That particular paragraph is exactly on the level as to what fifth-graders will learn about it. When you, or your young student are looking at What’s Wild Outside Your Door? the 500-pound gorilla that you might be subconsciously thinking about is Nat Geo Kids. All of those books, as well as, this book are non-fiction books that also have their circular feet in the vein diagram of reference books. This book is by Peter Wohlleben, who has written several other children’s non-fiction, reference books that operate on a different plane than their more well-known counterparts. So what is the difference?
Know your role. My wife and I echo that sentiment made famous by The Rock many times a week. When we use it means that our strengths and weaknesses need to be realistically acknowledged and utilized, or not, accordingly. For us, it’s not used as a pejorative, but when The Rock said it it was usually meant as a precursor to someone getting the rock bottom. I know my role when it comes to math homework. I can assist with social studies homework. I can assist with English homework. When it gets past seventh-grade math homework, my quality is suspect and I need to flag up for help. If you’ve been to a big box warehouse store you have seen The Big Fat High School Algebra 1 Workbook, and we can 100% attest to the fact that this book saved our bacon the other week.
Our 13-year-old came home and needed help with his math homework. He was babbling something about not understanding slope and slope-intercept form and all I could do was think of some lame skiing joke that might’ve been remotely humorous to those inclined. Actually, I did substitute last year for an advanced eighth-grade math class that covered that subject, but my ability to parrot that information was flushed down the memory hole. With the immediacy of his quiz and the fact that I knew The Big Fat High School Algebra 1 Workbook was in the other room, I got it for him to research it himself.
The great thing about 13-year-olds is that they can research and obtain their own answers. We explained to him that my math abilities were suspect and that every process and answer he was seeing was correct. He could try out the way he thought to solve each equation, and then confirm or correct his approach. In true math caveman style I could’ve Googled how to do it, watched said video and then had him sit with me once I knew the process. I could’ve done that, yes. However, that would’ve taken too long, watered down his desire to do his homework in a timely manner and possibly produced answers that I couldn’t explain.
What’s great about The Big Fat High School Algebra 1 Workbook is that it’s approachable, takes baby steps, and sets the students up for success. As the content was vaguely familiar to me I could understand it once I took my time and analyzed how they were completing the equations. The written descriptions have keywords that are bolded with simple, direct definitions. There are ten units, with each chapter given one given a different colored page border in order to distinguish the areas and provide subconscious goals for them to achieve.
For the non-math inclined, you will be able to understand the book. The text is written in simple English that is not presented in a way that’s designed to trick you. It cuts right to the point and has anything that could be remotely tricky like domain, exponent or radicand in bigger, different-colored font, as well as, an arrow pointing to the numbers in questions. In theory, you could start from zero knowledge and figure out how to assist their kids with homework using The Big Fat High School Algebra 1 Workbook. The book can operate as a teaching tool like that, but it’s going to be best utilized as a review aide for upper middle school or high school students.
Each unit has several chapters that break down the large topic to more palatable sections. The end of each chapter has several questions to test student’s math comprehension. Most importantly, there are answers with step-by-step instructions on how each problem was solved. This is more of a solution process, instead of an answer key because it shows students how each step in the problem should look in order to get the correct answer. There are more than 400 exercises and word problems in the book to help students master Algebra 1. The great thing about math is that anyone can do it, it just takes practice. Some students will understand the process with minimal explanation, and some will require multiple explanations, but anyone can learn it.
Our youngest is one who needs to encounter the steps many different times and with many different equations in order for him to understand it. The Big Fat Workbook series will be his comforting jam as he continues up the middle school ranks. Like a good salesperson it tells people what they’ll learn, shows them what they’ll learn, has them practice some problems and then moves on to the next issue. Another great aspect of The Big Fat High School Algebra 1 Workbook is that its retail price is only $16.99. It’ll be cheaper at big box stores and when you factor in that it provides hours of algebra practice and could possibly avoid the need for a math tutor it makes the book an invaluable resource.
The Big Fat High School Algebra 1 Workbook is written by Robert Vigneri, reviewed by Richar Blankman and available on Workman Publishing Co., Inc, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group.
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