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: Edgewood you’ll find:
Dangling participles, Concurrent Lines, Christina Rossetti’s “A Chill,” Dealing with Troubles, Parallel Lines, Trapezoids, Right Angles, Facing Things You Don’t Want to Do, Functions, Rhombuses, Constant Functions, Tripoli, Eritrea, Median Average, Writing Larger Numbers with Commas, Using Logarithms to Solve 2x = 5, Birdie Rule for Logarithms, Finding Approximate values for log 5 on a Calculator, Bar Graphs, Math Poems, >, Couplets in Poetry, Strait does not mean Straight, Judging People by their Size, If Fred Were an Author, Numbers that Add to 8, 10, and 12, Population of the Earth, State Income Tax Rates as Percents, Definition of Polka Dots, Parallelograms, Rows and Columns of a Matrix, the Four Kinds of Sentences: Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative, and Exclamation, Pronouns, Quarter of an Hour, Importance of Seat Belts, Small, Medium, and Large Mistakes, Busted vs. Broken, Half Dozen, Gibbous Moons, Dusk, Two Kinds of Knowledge Errors, Firearm Safety, Symptoms of Hypothermia, Voluntary and Involuntary Actions of the Body, Lorentz Contraction, International Date Line, Treatment of Hypothermia, the Addition Game Using Playing Cards, Alright Is Not a Word, Playing Guess-A-Function, Six Examples of Functions: Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Tangent, and Derivative, One Way to Feel Lonely, What It Means to Matriculate.
Don’t be fooled. This is real math. And you may learn a lot more than math along the way!
