You know what arithmetic books look like. They are all pretty much alike. Using very few words, they give a couple of examples and then have the students do a hundred identical problems. Then they give another couple of examples and another hundred problems. And for students, arithmetic becomes as much fun as cleaning up their rooms, eating yams, or going to the dentist.
The books in the Life of Fred series take a different approach. Veteran math teacher, Stan Schmidt, has brought to life a character who will make math fun, relevant, and understandable. Don’t be surprised if your child who dreads math asks to do more at the end of a lesson. Each of the books tells a story—a story of one day in the life of a five-and-a-half-year-old boy. All of the math arises out of Fred’s life. Never again will students have to ask their perennial question: “When are we ever gonna use this stuff?”
Don’t let the nontraditional method of teaching fool you. Each of these books contains more math than is normally taught in a traditional program. These are not skimpy, just effective. One of the reasons is that very few arithmetic books tell you the why of various math rules—they just say that “it’s a rule”. Fred will give you the reasoning behind the rules making the math much more meaningful and memorable.
These books are gloss-film laminated hardcovers with Smyth sewn binding. Fully indexed and illustrated. They are not workbooks to write in, and each book will be enjoyed by all your children (and grandchildren!)
The 10 books in the Life of Fred Elementary Series will teach everything your student need to know in order to move into the study of Fractions and beyond. They will generally fill your math needs from 1st through 4th grades and the titles are ordered alphabetically beginning with Apples to make it easy to keep track of what comes next.
In the ninth book in the Life of Fred Elementary Series you’ll find:One Use of Poetry, The Big Question in Arithmetic, Stationery vs. Stationary, Multiplying Two-digit Numbers, a Pound of Hamburger Weighs More Than a Pound of Gold, the Last Ten Multiplication Facts, How to Remember 7×8 = 56, Sigma Notation, Bibelots, Subtracting 12 oz. from 15 lbs., Forestland in the United States, Hyperbole, Bar Graphs, Ordered Pairs, Business Letters vs. Personal Letters, Capitalization in Closing Salutations, Elapsed Time, First and Second Coordinates, Using Honey Cards, Why Algebra Does Not Use the Times Sign (×), How to Polish Leather Shoes, Maps as Seen by Artists, War Historians, Mathematicians, Lovers of Cheese, and Literature Historians, a Poetical Meaning for “the Land of Milk and Honey,” Endoplasmic Reticulum, Finding Cyprus on a Map, the Cardinality of the Set of All Ice Cream Flavors that Begin with the Letter Alpha, Implicit vs. Explicit, the Two Major Countries on the Iberian Peninsula, Why You Can’t Find an Ibex in Kansas, Minutes and Hours in the Metric System, How to Have Ice in the Summer in Kansas in 1843, Improper Use of Seat Belts, Plotting Points on a Graph, Why You Shouldn’t Park on the Sidewalk, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni’s Painting, Perimeter, the One Reason for Mathematics, When Eating Ice Cream Can Be Torture, Irony, Hooke’s Law, Slope of a Line, Estimating Using Graphs, Changing the Scale on a Graph, Counting Back Change, Liberty vs. Freedom, the Commutativity of Set Union, Less Than (<) and Greater Than (>), Homogenized Milk, Why Use Soap, Cryogenics, What You Can Do If You Have Tons of Casual Cash (the answer: buy graph paper), Joe’s Stomach Has Only Finite Capacity, Why Brass Braces Are Better Than Regular Braces, Area of a Rectangle.
