Published by Oxford University Press, 29th August 2024
We might all enjoy reading in our house but Maths is a different story. Apart from my son, who does prefer sums to stories (and he does love stories too!), it's always a struggle to get our head around different mathematical concepts.
That's where books like this come in. With a super-genius title: Do Sharks Like Ice cream, Polly Owen grabbed our attention from the get-go and prompted a discussion before we'd even turned the first page. Do sharks like ice-cream? What a question? How could we possibly know that when sharks live underwater?
Spoiler alert! This isn't actually a book about whether sharks like ice-cream but it's still brilliant. It's a readable, engaging and useful exploration of statistics written by an author who has a degree in the subject. With bite-size explanations and real-life stories centred around engaging diagrams and pictures, it highlights how statistics can be used in every-day life, from predicting the future to cracking codes and even catching criminals. Have you been cheating at your homework? Well, thanks to statistics, teachers might be able to tell!
The joy of this educational, non-fiction book is that it takes a tricky subject and makes it truly fascinating by showing how it relates to the real world. The enthusiasm of Polly Owen's writing and subject knowledge totally rubbed off on my year 5 reader as he dived into the pages like a shark after a taste of the cold stuff. He particularly loved 'The Three Door Problem' and the puzzle element of statistics.
Now we just need Polly to explain algebra to us...
A big thanks to Polly for sending us a review copy. Do Sharks Like Ice-cream? is available from retailers now.
Thank you Tracy! This is so lovely to read. Thanks to your son too! The puzzle and paradoxes bits are our favourite too!
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