I am always looking for books and projects that combine art, reading and math skills, so I was thrilled to discover this book series a few years ago that effortlessly combines bedtime stories with fun math challenges.

You probably read a bedtime story with your young child every night, but how often do you solve bedtime math problems?

For the last few years, my children have enjoyed the Bedtime Math books and website as a frequent part of our nightly story time.  The Bedtime Math book series, the website, and the app all offer a variety of fun, kid-friendly math riddles on entertaining topics including animals, roller coasters, popcorn, and submarines.  While my daughter prefers reading the math riddles in a hard-cover book, my son looks forward to a math-inspired video on the iPad each night.  Plus, with three different skill levels for each topic (wee ones, little kids, and big kids), there’s a challenge for everyone.

With a randomized field experiment of 587 first-graders, we tested an educational intervention designed to promote interactions between children and parents relating to math. We predicted that increasing math activities at home would increase children’s math achievement at school. We tested this prediction by having children engage in math story time with their parents. The intervention, short numerical story problems delivered through an iPad app, significantly increased children’s math achievement across the school year compared to a reading (control) group, especially for children whose parents are habitually anxious about math. Brief, high-quality parent-child interactions about math at home help break the intergenerational cycle of low math achievement.

Here is the link to the full article:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6257/196.full 

Whether reading a riddle in one of the books or watching a math-inspired video clip on the app, Bedtime Math provides a fun and easy way to add math activities to bedtime or anytime at home.