Life of Fred math

I have tried several different math approaches in my last 14 years of homeschooling… Saxon, Singapore, Horizons, Abeka… I have never seen anything as good as the combo I am using now, which is Life of Fred along with Miquon.  My daughter is turning 6 this week and has just been through her first year of doing formal “schoolwork” and I am so impressed with what she has learned.  She is doing addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, telling time, ordinal vs. cardinal numbers, understands the concept of infinity, knows what perpendicular means, can write a set correctly and understands what it means, and on and on and on.  No, she cannot rattle off a times table yet or even an addition table for that matter, and I’m not sure that she could just grab a Horizons math book and start filling out pages… but I can see that she truly *thinks* math and understands it.  My older kids can tell me what 2×8 is because they have memorized it.  This one looks at 2×8 and says, “so that’s two eights, right?”  And then she adds 8 and 8 on her fingers.  That may not sounds really impressive to you, but it is to me as I have seen all four of my older kids struggle to think mathematically and to really understand what they are doing.  I really think that this is all because of having the verbal explanations from LOF along with the hands on manipulation of Miquon.  So, all of that is just meant as my wholehearted endorsement for FRED, but use it along with something hands-on and concrete.

hi binky,  I only have time for a real quick reply so I can’t give you as much detail as I’d like to right now.  There are samples of Miquon on currclick.com that you can look at.  It is all done using cuisenaire rods.  It is intended for 1st -3rd grade.  However, I will be having all of my children go through the books this summer as soon as we finish our SCM pet shop math course.  They will balk at it, I am sure, saying that it’s way too easy.  And it is too easy for them.  But I think it’s important for them to do it so that they can *see* the math, if you know what I mean.  When I got the first miquon book, I didn’t know what to do with it.  I had to order the “Lab Sheet Annotations” book.  This has instructions for each page in all six miquon books.  After about 2 weeks, I had the hang of it and haven’t looked at the book since.  I do think that I would have just pushed it aside in the beginning if I hadn’t order the Annotations book.  I got my copy of that on Amazon for about $3.  All of the miquon books are available on currclick, so I’ll buy them from there so that I can print a copy of each for my older kids.  Please let me know if I can answer any specific questions for you.  Oh, forgot to say that you also need the little plastic thing that the Cuisenaire rods slide into.  It looks like a ruler with a slot down the middle of it.  I can’t think of the specific name for it right now.

I have never used Math u See.  Sorry.

We use RightStart with Life of Fred.  I use them completely separately.  We do our regular RS lessons M-Th.  On Friday we do LoF as “living math” and then later in the afternoon they do another RS lesson.  For us, LoF is a fun supplement, not a fit it in the exact place we are in our other math program.  One of my older boys is working through the elementary series on his own.  He does one lesson a day, along with his RS lessons.  He considers LoF fun and not extra work.

We are LOVING LOF! DD11 uses it in combination with Strayer Upton Practical Arithmetic and DS8 uses it in combination with Math Mammoth. I’m not sure I’d use it on it’s own, but it’s been a FANTASTIC addition for us.