Title: Magnetic First Sums

Written by: Mary Denson

Illustrated by: Barry Green

Published by: Top That! Publishing

These are hard-board books, which have been designed to promote numeracy skills, help hand-eye coordination and to encourage parent-child interaction are ideal for home learning at this difficult time. The pages are magnetic so the words and numbers do not easily fall off and the pages can be turned leaving the magnets in place, although there are not enough of some numbers to complete the whole book this way.

The Taking Away book contains over 70 sum magnets and the Adding Up book boasts to containing over 100 sum magnets. In my opinion the books will make learning fun whilst encouraging and reinforcing counting and taking away up to 10 (such as: 5-3 =; 7+2=).

Barry Green’s bright and colourful double-page spread illustrations contain a lot of action, ideal for prompting discussion whilst matching the numbers, pictures and symbols to the pages. I particularly like the way they relate adding and taking away to things that are familiar to the children in everyday life, such as how many children playing on the different equipment at the park altogether, and put the correct number of pairs of socks on the bed, if you put one pair of socks in the wash how many are left, etc.

Suitable for children aged three upwards, I think they would also make an ideal activity for KS1 children on the maths table. You will need a pretty little pot to keep all the magnets in though once you have taken them out to use.