Morgan and the Forty Thieves Book Review
If you are looking for pure multiplication worksheets, this is not for you.
If you have a young gifted child who is ready for an introduction to multiplication, this is a wonderful book for this purpose.
If your child loves stories and shies away from any kind of mathematics, then this is a great way to introduce multiplication.
If you have a young gifted child who is also a reluctant mathematician, this book is perfect.
If you are looking for something like Life of Fred or Arithmetic for Billy Goats, you will find that Morgan and the Forty Thieves is similar in that it hooks readers in with a story but the latter contains much more of a story and much less of any kind of forced practice.
Through an engaging story, young readers are introduced simply without difficulty or effort to how multiplication works. There is also science (Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, various animals), history (telegram, Golden Age of Islam), geography (Massachusetts, Persia), literature (Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Thousand and One Nights), and mathematics (Counting, Magic Square, Puzzles, Patterns, Geometry) involved in this unit type experience. The author has created a free teacher's guide on her website with numerous resources and activities that can be used in conjunction with reading the book. While some readers may want to read it in one sitting, some teachers/parents may want to prolong the experience via extensive research and games.
I highly recommend this for young gifted children ready for multiplication and/or for young reluctant mathematicians.