Connected

Connected: Networks for Kids

R. A. Stephens

Tamlyn Teow

Wombat Books, 2026

32pp., hbk., RRP $A24.99

9781761113178

Chloe has a dot on her shirt called a node. So do her friends and family, and all the other people depicted on the end pages of this unique, informative book that is designed to help young children understand a host of quite complex, theoretical mathematical concepts, particularly networks.

Chloe explains that the dot represents her and she is directly connected to her brother Jack and sister Jasmine, not just by blood but by invisible lines known by the experts as edges or links.  But, in addition, Chloe has friends she is connected to, as do Jack and Jasmine and now, instead of just a family, there is a network…

A peek inside…

Long, long ago when I taught in a school where children were streamed from Kindergarten according to their ability in maths and literacy, a practice I abhorred, I was given the “bottom” maths group, a class of children who saw themselves as failures in the subject even though they were only seven years old!!!  A huge rethink about how to turn this around was required and so the accepted traditional, theoretical, compete-the-workbook page was replaced with practical activities that directly related to the children so they could see how maths had meaning for them (and led to Maths About Me ,  Maths About My Year and the Teachers’ Ideas Books for the first three years of the Eureka Maths scheme.)  It was also a turning point for the students who not only began to understand the concepts and appreciate their relevance, but started to turn their personal attitudes towards maths in particular and school in general around – I know this because one of those students is married to my son!

Therefore, the practical nature of Stephens’ explanations and Teow’s illustrations really resonated with me.  How much easier would it be to teach graph theory and all the terminology associated with it if we started with each student building a basic network using their family and friends as the starting point?  

But while the reader is given some extra maths facts in the final pages, and teachers could be inspired to try the mapping activities in the classroom, it has a much broader application that taps into student well-being, because by starting with our people and then expanding that to their people. students can see that they are never alone, that they have connections everywhere and those connections can lead to even more until there is a global network! It’s a great way to help children understand how communities form, how they are intertwined and interdependent and indeed, how many networks they actually belong to.  In fact, Stephens dedicates the book to “anyone who has ever felt alone”, especially relevant in a world that has never been so connected yet disconnected at the same time. 

Whether this is used in the maths classroom to turn the abstract into concrete, or to show how there is always someone we can turn to, it is a most valuable resource and its originality is outstanding. It would have been a brilliant support to the class of 87.