Life of Fred Elementary Books - a recap

Back in August I posted that I had purchased the new Life of Fred Elementary books. It's taken us this long to get through them, and I thought I would let you know what our thoughts are on the matter now that the shiny newness of it all has worn off.

Here is my original post: http://yetanotherhomeschoolblog-sheri.blogspot.com/2011/08/life-of-fred-elementary.html.

Having (almost) finished reading Apples, Butterflies, Cats, and Dogs, I will say that my kids still love them even though they are pretty easy material-wise. For us it was just a matter of reading aloud two or three chapters at a time and verbally calling out the answers to the questions at the end of each chapter. There was a great deal of simple arithmetic, which for a younger kid would have been a wonderful non-threatening way to introduce or practice things. At the same time, really complex stuff was also introduced. Algebra was introduced right off the bat (simple substitution of a number for a letter), ordinal and cardinal numbers, sets, prime numbers, and other things that you might not necessarily have in early arithmetic books. Along the way, there were lessons about biology, history, the evolution of language and many other things. A rundown of what is in each book can be found here.

All-in-all, this was a nice little supplement for us. It was worthwhile to review and learn a few new things on the side, even though my kids are older than the target age group for these books. If I were picking them up for my Pre-schooler/Kindergardener/First-grader, I think I would still use them as supplemental because I don't think they really cover enough material to be a full course of instruction. I would especially recommend them to parents with kids that don't like math because the zaniness of the story line and the story format, itself, which effectively renders the material fun and non-threatening.

My daughter is starting Life of Fred: Fractions now. She's a classic math-a-phobe, so I'll let you know how that goes. Hopefully these elementary books have been a good warm-up and the change of pace from our usual curriculum (Singapore Math) will help to drive the lessons home.

By the way, there are now ten of these elementary books (I could have sworn there were just 4 in August): "Apples", "Butterflies", "Cats", "Dogs", "Edgewood", "Farming", "Goldfish", "Honey", "Ice Cream", and "Jellybeans".