Check out These Math Picture Books For Home Schooling

Reading stories about subjects is a great way to learn that doesn’t feel like learning as much as memorizing facts or using a workbook.

And when kids are first learning their numbers and basic math concepts, engaging stories are a great way to get them started. This collection of math picture books from Imagination Soup is a great one to get you started introducing numbers and math to your little one, or to slip into their reading basket for them to discover.

A lot of these are great to read with related activities, such as making black dots to go with 10 Black Dots by Donald Crews or finding your own 100 things to count with one of the 100th-day books.

While many of these are for younger kids, there are also books that include addition, subtraction, multiplication, sorting, division, geometry, money and telling time, among other concepts that will be enjoyed by elementary-aged kids as well.

Do you use stories to teach about numbers and math? Of these, my daughter loved Mouse Shapes and Mouse Count the most (so far). Which ones have your kids loved?

[Photo via Imagination Soup.]

Looking for more resources? Check out these board games for learning Math and Multiplication?

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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