What I really like is that the numbers stay the same; all the 2’s are shoes, 3 is a tree, 4 is a door, 5 is a hive, 6 = chick, 7 = surfin’, 8 = skate and 9 is a sign. Once you can remember these 8 numbers/pictures there’s no guessing what the number is for that story (unlike Times Tables the Fun Way where the number pictures do not stay the same but change). Of course, the numbers in the answer are not the same…..if the answer is 9 it doesn’t mean the 9 in the answer will be a sign. Each picture also has the number inside it (the shoe has a 2 inside of it, there’s a 3 up in the leaves of the tree, etc).

This book has pages of everything you need in the back of the book. Some things, like the flash cards, you could just cut right out of the book. The larger cards you can also, but you might want to also make copies so that your child can color one. Every lesson is spelled out with exactly what you need and even tells you what to say.

The first story is for 2 x 2. The story is: “A young boy received a pair of new shoes and they were just what he wanted. When he put them on, he found they were too big. Even though they didn’t fit, he decided to wear them to school the next day. Sometimes, as he would walk along, he would step right out of them. He would look down at his feet and be in his socks. The shoes would be sitting on the floor. As you can imagine, this was very embarrassing for the boy. 2 X 2 = 4; Shoe X Shoe = Floor”. After reading the story the child can color the picture (obviously it’s 2 shoes on the floor). The child is also told to close their eyes and picture the 2 shoes sitting on the floor. It also explains to your child that the 2’s rhyme with shoes and the 4 rhymes with floor and they can close their eyes and picture this. They can even act out the story.

Here’s another example further along in the book: 8 X 8. “Two skaters went to a skating rink. They put on their skates and started skating. After only a few seconds, they stopped moving. They didn’t know what was wrong. They looked down at the floor and were shocked. The floor was covered with sticky, gooey gum. Their skates were stuck to the sticky floor. 8 X 8 = 64; Skate X Skate = Sticky Floor”.

Even the product of the numbers multiplied has a consistency to it that you won’t find in Times Tables the Fun Way. What I mean by this, as an example, is that the answers in the 60’s are all sticky…….63 is sticky bee, 64 is sticky floor. If another multiplication sentence has the answer 63…it will be sticky bee again. The 30’s are dirty…….36 is dirty chicks, 35 is dirty dive, etc. I can see that my kids could really learn from these stories and pictures (and me too). If they see on paper 8 X 8 they’ll probably remember the two skates and think…..”oh yeah, sticky floor…..64″. In the back of the book (its over 200 pages) are large cards to color, smaller flash cards, quizzes and picture quizzes where they draw the pictures. I’m more than happy with this book and highly recommend it.