The story within The Girl Who Heard the Music is interesting. It’s about a piano prodigy who lived on a remote island. It’s also about a massive trash problem that the island is constantly dealing with from its tourists and the water surrounding it. It’s also about a school that was built from tens of thousands of bottles and cans. There’s a lot happening in The Girl Who Heard the Music and somewhere in the book is an inspiring story, if you manage to isolate that aspect of it.
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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I know that there’s a fish called the snotnose blobfish, I’ve read dozens of elementary school essays about them. Kids want to be the first ones in their group to know something or state unique facts. 100 Disasters That Shaped World History is a non-fiction, age-appropriate, reference book on events that have mainly happened in recent history that still resonate with people or cultures today. It’s a very smart book that’ll introduce events that they might’ve heard about directly, but have certainly heard about through comparative events.
School-age children want to be scared. Nay, school-age children need to experience scary, spooky, well-told stories that shake their skin. They don’t need to be able to quote dialogue from some Korean horror film or break down their favorite Saw entry, but they need to see some darkness, even if it’s splattered with music, humor or thought. Eerie Tales from the School of Screams is a graphic novel that oozes with things that go bump in the night. Its thick presence, patient pacing, and varied short stories elicit a variety and genuine dread, with just a grimace of awareness that makes this graphic novel resonate with those aged eight and up.
The other year I read The Thief of Always to a group of fifth-grade students. I personally had read some Clive Barker before and wasn’t familiar with this dark fantasy release that’s come to be a modern-day classic. What makes that book so awesome is what makes Finch House, a really great book for those middle-elementary school through lower middle-school readers. It’s age-appropriate scary, which is a really tough characteristic to nail down because if it’s too soft then the young readers will see it as babyish and if it’s too graphic then it won’t be attractive to those readers at all.
There are certain illustrated books that hammer down into a select age range so efficiently that they’re the Zillow of suspect real estate areas. If you decide on a house that’s just one block down from another it could mean that your dream house has turned into a den of depreciation. The Together Tree is a very cute illustrated book that has its footprint firmly situated in the pre-k through first-grade market. Should any second graders enter the orbit of The Together Tree their “baby book” radar will immediately go off.
While his name might not be on the tip of your tongue, you know the story of Jadav Payeng. He’s the Indian teenager who in 1979, started planting seeds on an abandoned, arid, desolate riverbank where nothing had ever grown before. Every day he returned to the area to plant new seeds and water the existing ones. Over time his trees turned into a thicket and then a forest, which eventually attracted insects, then the birds that consume (or live symbiotically with) them. The Forest Keeper is an illustrated book that tells this story in a manner that makes this stranger-than-fiction story grounded and very much in a matter-of-fact.
Kids love money. It’s not that they’re greedy Thurston Howell wannabe millionaires, rather, it’s more that they want to be lazy, do-nothing social media influencers who make dopey videos and get paid according to insane Markle-esque levels. A child’s curiosity about money and its power is natural. A Dollar’s Grand Dream felt familiar when I first looked at this illustrated book. Ah-this is similar to the book on pennies that I liked. While I disdain the fact that the penny, as a currency, is still a thing, the book itself was quite charming. This book follows that same template, but because it’s about a dollar, it has more weight, carries more interest, and is a better book because of it.
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