We did have one year when I tried doing math with out an actual curriculum. It was a great year. I used Kathryn Stouts's book Maximum Math which is a guide that tells you (and shows you how to teach) the math skills for each grade level. That year we "played" math and kept a math notebook. Em loved it and math was tearless. Sadly we went back to the old way of doing math (not sure why) the next two years and back to tears. However, I have gotten wiser as the years have gone by and decided to go back to the 'playing " math after she finishes the BJU Math 4 book. BUT I have been on a hunt to find something to add to our curriculum to make math a little bit more enjoyable and I think I found it, Life of Fred, the elementary books.
A friend of mine is using this with her daughter and mentioned several times how much they love it. I decided to look into it and see what the elementary series was like. First let me mention that these are not your normal math books. They are written in a story like fashion where a boy named Fred(who is a math genius and teaches math at a college and he is only 5 yrs old) lives his life encountering math along the way. Also the author strongly suggests you start with the first elementary book Apples even if you are in 4th level math, even if you zip through it. Each book is about 18 lessons if you do a chapter a day. This is the book we tried.
At first I was thinking this book was way too simple. I did not grasp how these books teach. As we did the readings little math was introduced and it was introduced very subtle. Each chapter ended with a Your Turn to Play section with 2-10 questions. The book Apples focused on telling time to the hour, members in a set, days of the week, ordinal numbers, and the addition/subtraction facts for the number 7. Does not sound like much but by the end of the book (it took Em two weeks to do the book) Em knew, with out hesitation, the facts for 7...no more counting in her head. I looked ahead at the 2nd book Butterflies and it seems to be focusing on the number 9 facts. I think each of the 9 elementary books will focus on a number to help cement the facts for it in the childs mind.
Since I have only used one of the 9 elementary books some may wonder why I am writing this blog post on Life of Fred. Obviously I do not know what the whole series is about and how the teaching methods will work long term. BUT what I do know is my math hater is asking to do Life of Fred math at 7:30pm on a Sunday night because she did not do any during the day and she "neeeds to have her Fred". Maybe she is enjoying them because right now they are easy for her, maybe it is because we sit together and I read the story to her, maybe it is the story, or maybe it is the few math problems she needs to work at the end of each chapter......whatever the reason, she is loving it. She has a positive math outlook when it comes to math and that is important.
UPDATE on Fred seen here
