Young students learn to comprehend the many uses of numbers as they engage in number games and fun-to-solve puzzles. Starting with counting, they advance to arithmetic, fractions, decimals, and the different ways of measuring.Teachers in grades 3 and 4 will appreciate the new Painless Junior Series of classroom helpers. Designed to resemble titles in Barron’s Painless Series— which are used in middle school and high school classrooms—the Painless Junior books feature larger page sizes, amusing illustrations, games, puzzles, and an approach to their subjects that reflects third- and fourth-grade curricula. Their purpose is to inject an element of enjoyment into subjects that many younger students find either boring or mystifying. Kids’ understanding will improve as they have fun learning. From the Reviews:"Every child has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. When those weaknesses turn into hate for a certain subject, that causes parents pain. How do you overcome that? Sometimes it just takes a different approach. The Painless Junior series—one for Math, one for Writing, and one for Grammar coming soon—tries to help your child over the current learning plateau. They just try to make it fun. While you can still be involved, these books are written to your child. Children can move at their own pace to learn, understand, and do the activities included. The book on Math has Pythagoras the Rooster helping your child to learn various skills, such as: telling time, place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication, money, measurements, geometry, graphs, fractions, probability, and problem solving. Each section includes a well-written description, with drawings to help in the understanding, and some activities for reinforcement. The book on Writing has Pythagoras show up again, but not in a major role. This time Sammy, the Writing Octopus, is the main character helping your child. Included in this book are sections that help your child get over writer’s block, rough drafts, playing with words, beginnings and endings, revisions, and the final copy. There is also a small bit of grammar, as we do need that to write. Your child is asked to start writing anything, whether it makes sense or not, just to get moving. While the time is set, the child must not stop writing, even if he or she writes, ‘I don’t know what to write,’ over and over again. Eventually something else will come out. Then the child moves on from there. While not a complete curriculum for any subject, for a reluctant learner this provides some new ways to get over that mental block.
