Introduction
Chapter 1- The first session: Narrative and reflections
Chapter 2- The boys’ math circle, year one
Chapter 3- Children and (52): The story of one problem
Chapter 4- The boys’ math circle, year two
Chapter 5- Notation, abstraction, mathematics, and language
Chapter 6- The boys’ math circle, year three
Chapter 7- The boys’ math circle, final six months
Chapter 8- At home and in school
Chapter 9- The girls’ math circle, year one
Chapter 10- The girls’ math circle, year two

This book is a captivating account of a professional mathematician's experiences conducting a math circle for preschoolers in his apartment in Moscow in the 1980s. As anyone who has taught or raised young children knows, mathematical education for little kids is a real mystery. What are they capable of? What should they learn first? How hard should they work? Should they even “work” at all? Should we push them, or just let them be? There are no correct answers to these questions, and the author deals with them in classic math-circle style: he doesn't ask and then answer a question, but shows us a problem—be it mathematical or pedagogical—and describes to us what happened. His book is a narrative about what he did, what he tried, what worked, what failed, but most important, what the kids experienced.