This is a very nice book about drawing and art with some help from math, but there is very little about learning math. So the book is good, but the title a little misleading.

This is a fun and colorful book of art and craft projects that work in math concepts like geometry, symmetry, multiplication and graphing. The projects are broken into chapters like great artists (kids recreate types of art by artists like Klee who used squares and such), cooking projects (divide waffles into fractions and make jello in a bunch of colors, cut them into cubes, and then add gelatin to sweetened condensed milk over the whole thing to make a pan of white jello with colorful jello squares and then count the colors in your piece, for instance) and cultural math art (make a design with sharpies and toothpicks like "Native American quill art," for instance), among others.

The book is recommended for ages 8-12 but I would personally use it for younger ages, maybe 5 to 10. My 8 y/o daughter is likely to enjoy a lot of these crafts but I don't think most will appeal to my 12 y/o son. Also, these aren't terribly advanced math concepts for the most part, so actual educational value for a 12 y/o is going to be pretty small.

What I liked: There are lots of color photos of every project and the steps are laid out simply. You don't need specialty items for most of them. The variety of types of crafts was nice, though most are paper based or recipes. The little glossary of math concepts at the start was helpful. I also liked the art in the style of artists and the multi-cultural chapter (though I recommend using the correct names for tribes like Dakota instead of Sioux).

What I didn't like as much: This is one of those educational books where kids learn to love a subject by just sort of accidentally using concepts of it without giving actually educational content to go along with it. It's a lot like the science experiment books where kids do science projects that feature concepts like evaporation or polymers but don't actually talk about what's happening so it's just sort of magic as far as the kids are concerned. In many cases here, kids do have to use a bit of math (like filling in a multiplication chart and then coloring multiples by color) but in some cases it's pretty slight. For instance, there's a project where you put a pan in the middle of a giant piece of paper, fill it with different colors of paint, and then drop rocks into it. You can then measure the paint splatters from different angles and ways you threw the rocks. Yes, that is a bit of math (and kids are likely to really like a project that messy and physical, my 12 y/o included) but I'm not sure it's going to "build amazing math skills." As another example, one of the artist projects involves hiding numbers in a painting. Yes, numbers are math, but that's not going to give your average 8-12 year old huge mathematical benefits. This is one reason I'd recommend it for a slightly younger audience than it's geared towards.

The recipes are standard recipes that won't work for kids on special diets (gluten free or vegetarian) since they use gelatin, white flour, etc. Readers can substitute their own recipes for most of hers, though the gelatin based recipes would be tricky to replicate.

All in all, these are fun crafts that younger kids will likely enjoy. They work in some basic math concepts and can help quietly reinforce math skills.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.