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 Life of Fred: Cats you’ll find:
Ursa Major (Big Bear), Commutative, Asterism, Vowels, Cardinality of a Set, Loud Talkers, Hiring Freeze, One Quarter, Numerals vs. Numbers, Counting by Threes, Hoodwinked, Finding Patterns, Sheet Music for “Happy”, Four Basic Emotions, Right Angles, Quarter and Half Notes, Obligate Carnivores, Adjectives and Verbs, Carbohydrates, a Quarter to Three, the Mariana Trench, 5280 Feet in a Mile, Ferdinand Magellan’s Trip, What Pacific Means, Bacteria, Rabies in 300 B.C., Treating Cat Scratches, Capital Letters Start Sentences, Five Vowel Words: Mat, Met, Mit, Mot, Mut, Twenty-Two English Words That Don’t Contain a Vowel: By, Cry, . . . , Tryst, and Why, Numbers Expressed as Hundreds, Tens and Ones, Sexagesimal and Decimal Systems, Numbers that Add to 13, Morse Code, Four Major Oceans of the World, Centuries, Centenarians, and Centurions, Homonyms, Square Feet, Prepositional Phrases, 71 English Prepositions, Volume, One Meter, the Three Countries of the World that Don’t Primarily Use the Metric System. What Mathematicians Do, Prime Numbers, Less Than (<).
Don’t be fooled. This is real math. And you may learn a lot more than math along the way!
