Funville Adventures

Funville is magical, but in a logical way.Kids will enjoy thinking about why one Funvillian's power works differently than another Funvillian's, and may even think of their own ideas for powers that might exist in Funville (and how best to use them)! This book encourages kids (and adults!) to think about mathematical functions not as things that might appear on a test at school, but rather as ideas that might not be out of place in a Harry Potter book.Overall, Funville Adventures is a thoroughly fun book that winks at classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth while being entirely its own, wonderfully fun adventure tale.

This exciting story pulls you in. You feel you are part of the characters in Funville while learning mathematics.

The characters in the magical land of Funville each have a unique power to do a function. They mirror, rotate, make things invisible, copy, change color, double, shrink, quantify, keep things the same, and change other people’s power (a function on a function). You have no idea that you are reading a math story from beginning to end. In the addendum is where they make the connection to math, specifically. I love the premise and think this book has potential to be very special.The story gets off to a quick pace, you are drawn in.. you meet 2 Funvillians (brothers), curious things are happening and after the reader grows a relationship to the Funvillians, Emma and Leo just say.. ‘bye.’ Abruptness in the story, and no math to play with. Fortunately, it’s a quick read. If it had a “Your Turn To Play” as in Life of Fred, or otherwise took the mathematical ideas further, that would have made this book awesome for me. As it stands, my child and I learned almost nothing. Kids already have curiosity about rotation, etc. naturally. That said, there may be a little fuel for me to run on (to try and find things to go along with this book, myself). To think of functions as powers is pretty cool, and I think having that image and story in our head when we encounter this in more depth later is valuable.If they release a new one with a "Your Turn to Play" /activities, I would be very excited about that. Edited to add: My son (almost 9) enjoyed the book.

Great book! My son loves all the adventures, and doesn’t even realize he was just introduced to some very fundamental math concepts. It is also fun to act out some parts of the book in the classroom, my 2nd grade group love it!

This excellent book is a fun adventure for children to read. They won't even realize that the "sophisticated" concept of mathematical functions is being introduced. This is due to author's key insight that in reality, this is an idea that doesn't require high school mathematics prerequisites, or even the ability to add. It is, in fact, one of the most intuitive concepts in mathematics. The author therefore rightly places this idea behind an adventure for children with magical powers, where it belongs, rather than in a dry discussion of difficult abstract ideas. Also, there are elephants!

My son and I read this book and when we finished I asked him to write a short review. Here is what he actually wrote (with a small corrections from my side): "This adventure is an interesting book about mathematics. Me and my dad both liked it very much. In 3rd grade, it helped me in a different way of thinking in math, and I hope others find it helpful, too. I liked the part when Emmy and Leo slid down the Thief and found themselves at the bottom of a much cleaner slide. But my favorite part in the book was when Emmy and Leo saw the upside-down tree, it was a fun to see what they are going to do about this. In fact, I read this book in one day. And, since it`s so interesting, I can`t stop reading until the end."

My son has been studying math via Beast Academy curriculum and found this book to be similar in spirit and depth to the guide books.He was immediately hooked and finished reading it in 2 nights. This book describes complex concepts of how values can be converted from one to another in easy to understand way with fun examples and colorful illustrations. I wish there were more similar books that can help kids learn math without being intimidated by it being hard.

Great book that can be read simply as captivating adventure story, yet it can be taken further, for example as an introduction to pre-algebra concepts. I am taking off 1 star simply because I was able to get it at a better cost by purchasing directly from Natural Math website.