Rating: WARTY!
This was an awful book supposedly intended to teach the children to remember their times tables by concocting elaborate stories around then multiplication, such as, for example, to learn 3 x 3 = 9, you're supposed to memorize a hundred word story about triplets, if the kids even know what triplets are at that point in their lives. The mouse momma worried that her children would be born without tails, but each was born with three tails. I thought this was so ridiculous and burdensome - far more-so than simply learning the math rules to begin with - that it was nothing but a joke. I was hoping for a cat to eat them and become a cat o' nine tails as a result. Then you could really whip your math problems! LOL!
Seriously, how is it easier to learn when you make it so complex that the poor kids are swamped with asinine stories which work for only one math problem (in this case 3 x 3)? They have to learn a new and completely different story for 3 x 4, a story which has no relationship whatsoever to the 3 x 3 story? It wasn't even about mice! How is it easier to learn a hundred stories, than to learn ten simple rules for multiplying? If they could have come-up with some system of associating one animal with each set of problems, and one story for each of the ten numbers using that animal, I might have seen some benefit to that, but they didn't. The whole thing, to me, was a poorly conceived and the authors offered no evidence whatsoever that this system even worked, or if it did work, that it would be easier than merely learning the simple rules for basic math.
I can't recommend this ill-considered book which promises to complicate a subject and make it harder for children to get a good handle on it down the road, in exchange for the false promise of simplifying it now.
