Make learning fun with this selection of maths puzzle books. Perfect to reinforce and revise learning, these books make an enjoyable addition to any classroom. Complete with answer keys, readers can self-check their attempts. These would also be great to use over the holidays to keep those maths brains ticking over.
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Usborne Maths Puzzle Pad
by Kirsteen Robson
Review: Bright and colourful, young readers will want to pick up this book and solve the puzzles. Useful help sheets explain key maths concepts needed to tackle the problems. Fun challenges include cracking the code for a safe, helping Ferdie the frog hop across a pond, solving the problem to complete a number search (like a word search but with numbers) and using coordinates to find the image in a space chart. Containing more than 150 puzzles, there is plenty here to keep minds entertained.
Click here for a flick-through of the book.
Suggested Reading Age: 6 years +. Please note, many of the concepts featured are traditionally taught to older students between 7/8 and 10 years old.
Train Your Brain: Math Games
by Insight Kids
Review: Get your thinking caps on! This Insight Kids book is full of appealing games to solve. The puzzles address multiple areas of maths including data handling, the four operations and fractions, for example. Fun word problems invite readers to solve them. Colourful illustrations help to visualise the challenges, leading readers to dip in and out of the book. Popular topics such as football, animals, and space all feature making this accessible to a wide audience. Readers may also enjoy trying out Train Your Brain: Logic Games by the same publisher.
Suggested Reading Age: 7 years and up.
Do The Math! Challenging, Fun Math Puzzles For Kids
by Steven Clontz (Author), Jessica Clontz (Author)
Review: This puzzle book is perfect for young (and older!) mathematicians. Featuring more than 100 challenges, each of its eight chapters focuses on a different type of puzzle. As the chapter progresses the puzzles become more challenging. The “How To Use This Book” section at the beginning provides parents with an overview of the puzzle types and maths skills they help to develop. Clear instructions enable readers to tackle the puzzles independently. Featured puzzles include pattern puzzles, logic grid puzzles, calcudokus, cryptograms and, the highly appealing, emoji maths. The book ends with a series of enigmas to solve, the final one being a “Brain Buster”.
Suggested Reading Age: 8 to 12 years old.
The Original Area Mazes
by Naoki Inaba (Author), Ryoichi Murakami (Author)
Review: Based on a simple premise, all you need to know to solve Area Mazes is the formula to calculate the area of a rectangle. That’s easy you may say. Add in the need for some logic and suddenly these puzzles become much trickier than first envisaged. The further through the book you progress the trickier these puzzles get. Be prepared, the final solutions should be whole numbers, but the lengths or individual areas in the mazes may not be. Furthermore, the mazes are not drawn to scale, so you really do have to use your maths and logic skills to solve them. This makes a fun addition to more well-known maths-inspired puzzles.
Suggested Reading Age: 12 years and above.
The Puzzle Universe: A History of Mathematics in 315 Puzzles
by Ivan Moscovich
Review: An engaging idea, readers learn about the history of maths through puzzles. Each of the 315 puzzles comes with a challenge level and a list of tools needed to solve the puzzle. The mathematics linked to the puzzle is clearly explained and often highlights how this translates to real-world use. The featured puzzles are highly diverse featuring logic and word problems, too. If you are looking for a book to take your mathematical understanding to a new level whilst trying it out with some dastardly puzzles, this is the book for you!
Suggested Reading Age: Older teens and adults.
Happy Reading!
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Do YOU know any maths puzzle books to add to this list? If so, please leave a recommendation below .