Stats: Math Made Fun!

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Game Face and Suit Up are both coloring books. The former offers head
and shoulders illustrations that highlight the mask (containing a
generic face) worn by one of the goalies of each of the NHL teams.
Organized alphabetically by city, from the mask worn by Guy Hebert of
the Anaheim Might Ducks to Olaf Kolzig’s Washington Capitals mask, the
30 masks also include hypothetical mask designs for the league’s
expansion teams, the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Minnesota Wild. An
eight-page glossy insert provides a brief history of the goalie mask and
includes small color photos of the goalies. “Using the photographs of
all these cool masks, color in the drawings found in this book—either
exactly like the real goalies, or in any wild colors you like!”
instructs the text. Given the detail in some of the masks and the size
of the “model” photos, coloring the masks “exactly” could be a
challenge. Suit Up follows the same pattern as Game Face but features
action drawings of player. Here children are asked to color the uniform,
but the glossy pages, which talk about logos and uniform colors,
illustrate the team logos only and do not provide photographic examples
of the uniforms’ colors.

Some elementary- and middle-school teachers may be attracted by Stats
for it carries the subtitle, Math Made Fun! Adding, subtracting,
dividing, multiplying, calculating percentages, reading and creating
graphs are just some of the math skills that children are called on to
use as they try to answer the questions created from the information
found in real hockey scenarios. Three final “Breakaway Activities”
call for young readers to move outside the book and gather data from
current NHL action. A concluding section provides the answers to the
book’s problems.

In terms of hockey information, Body Checks is probably the most
informative of this quartet of books. Inside the front cover are 30
small full-color NHL team logo “temporary tattoos.” Once these are
cut out and applied, the book’s young user is left with single-page
profiles of the NHL’s teams. In addition to the team’s logo, each
page contains boxes that provide team records (both season and career),
greatest moments in the team’s history (if you want to know the
“worst moment,” you simply turn the page upside down), the dates of
Stanley Cup victories, the names of major award winners, and the name(s)
of the team’s arena(s). The brief text provides highlights about the
team. Full-color action photos of a couple of players for each team are
also included. A closing two-page section lists major award winners of
the Original Six. The book concludes with a glossary of hockey terms.

While all four books are principally home purchases, Stats and Body
Checks (tattoos removed) could find a place in library collections.
Recommended with reservations.