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Shari in NY
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| Posted: Feb 12 2014 at 7:12am | IP Logged
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Out of curiosity (and exasperation with Saxon) when you say you love Fred do you mean as a math program or as a supplement?
Edited to Note: This thread began as a question on this thread
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SallyT
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| Posted: Feb 12 2014 at 7:46am | IP Logged
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I am actually doing Fred as a math program with my 11-year-old. How long we will do this I'm not sure, and I do intersperse with extra practice problems and stretches of doing MEP. My 10-year-old has migrated from Fred to MEP -- she likes the orderliness of laid-out exercises. But her very verbally-oriented brother far prefers Fred.
Our daily routine: he reads a chapter, and then we do all or part of a Your Turn to Play (problem set) together. Some questions he can do in his head, and some are so complicated that we have to work them through carefully, and I don't think there's any way he would do them independently. My one complaint is that the small sets of drill/review problems that show up at the ends of chapters in some of the elementary books aren't included in all of them, by a long stretch. They were just enough without being overwhelming.
We're in the intermediate series right now (Kidneys, Liver, Mineshaft), which we began after Christmas. We'll finish Kidneys this week and should finish the whole series handily by the end of the year, with room to include some other kinds of math work. MEP is my other favorite, hands-down, and although this child is easily bogged down by exercises, I want to have him work through some of that. For pre-algebra, which we'll begin next year as a 2-year course, I think I want to use Fred plus the second half of MEP Year 4 . . .
But this is the language-arts forum! Anyway, yes, we do use Fred as a primary math program. No idea how it's going to play out on standardized tests at the end of this year, but it has been interesting and challenging.
My one hope for the language-arts series is that it's better edited and proofread than the math books are! Stanley Schmidt is a real Renaissance man, and his love for all kinds of knowledge is infectious, but his prose could use some editing, and there are always typos.
Still, I'd love to know what Jen (and others) think of it after using it!
Sally
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Mackfam
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Shari,
Since this is a good math question I'm going to move your question and Sally and my responses to the math forum, ok? 
Shari in NY wrote:
| Out of curiosity (and exasperation with Saxon) when you say you love Fred do you mean as a math program or as a supplement? |
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We took a half-year break from Saxon and worked through lots of LoF books across the ages/grades here. My two oldest had hit sort of a wall and I needed to step back anyway, and they both really responded to the conversational style of Fred, as well as the very varied topic spectrum in a Fred lesson. I used it with my little elementary aged fella, too, and he's hooked! All the kids enjoyed it immensely! So that was math time focused on Fred. Now we do a lot like Sally, Fred on the side.
I'm a committed Saxon girl. It is NOT by any stretch of the imagination perfect!! No way!! And it's dry and repetitive and overkill at times...but over the years I've learned to work with it, bend it to fit us and our needs, and I see how consistency with a good and solid math program (which I really believe Saxon to be) does more of a service for a child's math skills than jumping around a lot. So now, we do Fred-on-the-side. Which is to say, Saxon is primary here:
** 4th grader reads a LoF lesson independently every day and narrates to me. We do the *Your Turn to Play* exercise together after the narration. He's in Saxon 5/4.
** 8th grader reads LoF once a week - he's already read all the books up to Geometry/Trig so he can go slow and stretch a bit in Fred. He's in Saxon Algebra I.
** 12th grader has finished the LoF series up through Calc, and stopped there.
Agreeing with Sally on the syntax/editing in the LoF books!
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SallyT
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I should add that my current high-schooler has done Saxon since Algebra 1/2 to good effect -- well, that is, he did Algebra 1/2, Algebra I and II, and is now doing Teaching Textbooks geometry, because we had it and of their high-school math courses, it's the strongest. He's very linear, sciency, and self-motivated, and Saxon works for him.
My 11-year-old is another animal altogether. I'd like to think I'm going to transition him into Saxon for pre-algebra, because I do think it's solid . . . but if I did I think I'd probably do the reverse, and use Fred as the central math, and Saxon for practice questions.
But then, I really like MEP, though I don't do the program as written. My 10-year-old is going to town on it, and I could see picking up some of that to flesh out Fred for her brother for next year.
I do, on the whole, think that Life of Fred is much meatier than it appears, at least thus far -- we've done the whole elementary series plus the first book of the intermediate series. In the book we've just finished (Kidneys), we've been doing what seem to me to be fairly sophisticated algebraic formulae for a 5th grader . . . but in doing those problems, we do some fairly thorough runs through things like long multiplication and division, which we do need to practice. So what I think of as the "grammar" of math gets a pretty decent daily workout, even as we're learning about applying formulae and taking the shortcuts they offer (currently, how to find the sum of a long series of numbers without actually adding them all together).
Would I do this as our sole high-school math? I honestly don't know. I don't know anyone who has done that. It's one thing to feel fairly certain that what we're doing is lining up this particular child so that he can move forward into the algebra chute, and another to feel fairly certain that the same program is going to prepare the same child for, say, the SAT or college math. Of that I am far less sure.
Sally
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Shari in NY
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Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Jen, I am committed to Saxon, too. I was looking at the Fred website for testamonials of amazing SAT scores and they are just not there. All of my graduates (or near graduates) are Saxon babies and they all scored very well on the SAT. High 500's well and this with a severely math challenged mom leading them on. (After 6 "runs" through highschool math I feel I'm pretty strong through Algebra I now  Math is hard and a lot of work to "get" all those concepts to behave themselves and produce a "correct" answer.
Sally, you could be describing our highschool math program...Saxon through Algebra II and then Teaching Company Geometry mostly so I can put geometry on a transcript. It is difficult to describe Saxon's geometry although I think it works well to include it with the Algebra, better than a seperate course. Two of my guys have also done MUS Pre-Calc.
Fred looks like a lot of fun but probably best in the younger years where it could eliminate a lot of math angst. So, I guess if Saxon aint broke there is no reason to jump ship in February. Did I mention that Math is hard??
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SallyT
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I know! I'm not mathy, and it's always been a challenge. My eldest squeeeeeeaaaaaaked by in math, mostly doing TT (we got NOWHERE with Saxon with her), had extremely lopsided SAT scores, by some miracle did respectably in her one college math class, and is going to have an interesting time reviewing for the GRE, which she plans to take in the next year, to go to grad school to do Old English (a.k.a. How Far Can You Get From Math And Still Be On This Planet?) . . . So, that was Round One for us.
I'm glad the Saxon/TT thing made sense to you! That's exactly why we're doing TT geometry now, to have it to put on the transcript, and to have extra practice in doing proofs. He's finding it easy, but fun, which is not a bad thing in a really hard year with a heavy course load. Our plan is to have him move into trig next fall at Belmont Abbey, where my husband teaches -- that's been our ultimate answer to every high-school conundrum! One of the advantages of the chemistry courses he's taken there this year is that they've spurred him to be faster in math. He's very thorough, but slow, so I'm grateful for the challenge from outside.
I have trouble at this point seeing my next son coping with the sheer volume of Saxon work, though. We'll just have to see how he matures. He's quite able, but at 11 his mind goes on these flights of fancy between problems, so that presented with a page of them he could easily sit there all day not doing them. This is where the small, concentrated Fred lessons really, really help us: in four to six questions we can cover a lot of mathematical ground, and I can keep him focused. Again, I have no idea what his math score will look like this year, and while at this point I honestly don't care that much (except that nobody likes to feel that they're not getting questions right), I will care a lot more when it's SAT time.
Rather like his oldest sister, he is very verbal and very right-brain-ish, so he responds well to the narrative aspect of Fred. Funnily enough, it's just that verbal-ness of those books that completely loses my 10-year-old daughter. For a while I was doing Fred lessons with the two of them together, because they're in more or less the same place in math, but I could see that while she thought the story was kind of fun, the math ideas were blowing right by her. She does much, much better with an unadorned set of interesting problems before her -- she's good at discerning patterns and figuring out puzzles, and MEP is a lot like that.
It's very spirally, not unlike Saxon (though there the resemblance stops), with four or five short problem sets to a practice page, including word problems (at this level it often asks you to "make a plan," figuring out what function to use to solve the question, then estimating, then calculating), review of basic functions, sequences, tables, puzzles . . . The more we do it, the more thorough it seems to me. You could conceivably do it through high school, though as it comes from the British system it's set up differently, with all years doing a mix of algebra, geometry, and higher math, and receiving a really good, challenging math education. I feel more confident about MEP as a thorough math program than I do, ultimately, about Fred, and this might well be the path I take with both my younger kids.
But Fred is filling a real need for us right now, and for this one child I'm not ready to write it off entirely, especially if it's a question less of making knockout math scores than of learning math at all in any meaningful way.
Sally
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Shari in NY
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Sally, thanks for the discription of MEP even before I asked! You just knew I was curious didn't you?  My oldest daughter sounds a lot like yours. Fortunately for all concerned my brother volunteered to tutor her in Algebra and it really helped her SAT scores. I can still see them--he was patience itself, "Okay, sweetheart, do you understand now?" Daughter--"Yes, Uncle Mike, thanks, I get it now!" Uncle--"Okay, sweetheart, show me with this problem." And then the drama really took off! Sighs, hair tossing, pencil sharpening, more sighs and hair tossing, tears, sighs, sobs... and then when he remained serene through it all she buckled down and learned the concept!! It was an amazing thing to behold! She went on to study nursing in college with a full scholarship. Interestingly, she later told me the only things she learned in school that were useful in college was Latin and unit multiplyers.
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Aagot
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Wow! That Uncle Mike sounds like a saint! What a blessing for all of you.
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Shari in NY
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Aagot wrote:
| Wow! That Uncle Mike sounds like a saint! What a blessing for all of you. |
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You are so right! And in many more ways than this! Over the years, I don't think we could have made it without his support and he was totally against the idea originally!
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SallyT
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| Posted: March 19 2014 at 9:04am | IP Logged
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Whew, we need an Uncle Mike. We do have an uncle (my brother) who's a math tutor, but we don't have the kind of relationship where I'm comfortable letting him into our homeschooling -- alas. He's a good guy and a very good teacher, but I'm afraid he'd just view our deficits as evidence that homeschooling and I are both losers, even after all these years, and one child in college, etc. Again, alas.
Right now we're getting some mileage out of Khan Academy, which was what I really looked into this thread to say. I love their redesigned website, and both kids are enjoying working through tutorials and practice sets right now.
Here is how I'm feeling about Life of Fred right now, as we're finishing the intermediate series (one of the three books left to go) and looking forward to fractions, decimals, and then the pre-algebra series:
* I still think it's good. I still like it as our core math.
* What I like about it is that it prompts kids to think mathematically beyond the level of arithmetic, though I'm not sure it focuses enough on things like pattern (which MEP does emphasize). Mostly it provides fun with mathematical ideas, and lots of "here's a formula, and here are a billion ways to apply that formula." I think that all of this will make algebra much, much easier for this particular child; already I feel far more confident about approaching it with him.
*So, the child who's using LOF right now will be a 6th grader next year. As I said, we'll have finished the intermediate series, and possibly Fractions, by the end of this year. As I think about next year, I find myself taking our old (Second Edition) Algebra 1/2 off the shelf, because my one real complaint about Fred is that there's not enough practice, and not enough that my son can really do by himself. If I'm sitting there to make suggestions and write with him, he can do all the Your Turn to Play, but if I leave him alone, he's like, "Meh, I looked at it, and I could do two of the questions in my head, and I just blanked on the rest.") Doing the work together is good -- but I want him to have some independence. And contra the claims of LOF, I don't see it really as a self-teaching series.
SO: Looking at Algebra 1/2, I see that IF we did it over the course of two years, instead of one, we could do two Saxon lessons a week and still finish the book (actually, we could take longer if we needed, if the brain wasn't really ready for the abstraction of algebra by 8th grade). I am envisioning a math schedule, then, for 6th, that would look something like this:
Monday: Life of Fred (mostly pre-algebra series)
Tuesday: Saxon
Wednesay: Saxon
Thursday: Life of Fred
Friday: Life of Fred
These would be half-hour/45-minute lessons at this stage.
And then there's the MEP child, who'll be a 5th grader next year. We are moving veeerrrrrrry slowly, but possibly this is because Y4 is hard for her, and it might have been better to have started her in Y3 this year. Still, I love the quality of what she's doing. Though it's not structured like American math courses, with discrete high school subjects (two years of nuthin-but-algebra, a year of nuthin-but-geometry, etc), you could go all the way through MEP and receive excellent preparation for college math. I just hope we're able to pick up our pace a tiny bit next year!
Sally
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Shari in NY
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One thing I have learned over the years is not to rush math. The biggest problem my oldest daughter faced was being pushed through concepts so we could "finish the book" by year's end. My oldest son (third in the homeschooling line-up) taught me the value of starting over. He did Algebra I three times in highschool and managed to major in engineering inspite of only getting through about half of pre-calc. In college he did so badly on a physics midterm he asked the professor if he could start over and was given the greenlight for that and really pulled his grade around. Now, the twins have completed Algebra II, one stopped there and the other attempted Math U See's pre calc and got stuck in the same place. My ninth grader started in Algebra I but was quickly in over his head and we back-pedaled to Algebra 1/2. (Last year he did Making Math Meaningful by Jamie York. It was interesting but obviously the concepts didn't stick)He is doing great now and mostly on his own. We only do half of the problems-even or odd depending on the lesson number. It takes him about 45 to 50 minutes.I would try LoF for calculus but my twins have such bad cases of senioritis that I'm sure I would be the only one to read it!! All this angst over math is exhausting!
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SallyT
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| Posted: March 21 2014 at 7:55am | IP Logged
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No kidding. Math for my oldest was a complete angst-fest -- she made it through Algebra II by the end of senior year, had very lopsided SAT scores, and still managed to pull out a B in her one college math course (shall we call her Not-STEM-Girl? I think so!). She's survived just fine, but I still feel bruised from that whole experience! And now she's got to bone up on math for the GRE, but that's her business.
My second, who's a 10th grader, has been the pushbutton child. We doodled around in math all through his elementary years -- the most schematic thing he ever did was the last MCP workbook, over 5th and 6th grades. At the end of 6th, he picked up Algebra 1/2 and just started doing it, using Khan to help him over rough spots, and he was off to the races. I've had virtually no input into his math learning in years, other than to talk about what he wants to do and use. He did the two years of algebra in Saxon back-to-back and is now doing a Geometry year using Teaching Textbooks, because we had it on hand, and some Khan. His hope from here is to slot into Trig at Belmont Abbey and just do math classes there from now on -- fine by me! He is arithmetically very sound right now -- he's been taking General Chemistry and can do the math, though he tends to be kind of slow. I had heard, on some forum or other, that Saxon-trained kids had a hard time coping with the math in chemistry (presumably because they'd learned the math, but not how to "think mathematically"), but that's not been the case for us -- the hardest thing has been to have to keep up with the pace of the class, rather than working at his own pace. But he has adjusted.
And then I have these two younger kids, who are doing Fred and MEP. The MEP girl really dislikes the narrative aspect of Fred, which is funny because she is very verbal (but not a strong reader -- we're about to start vision therapy to address that, in fact). For her, the ideas seem to get lost in the story. For her brother, the story is the only thing that makes the math bearable -- though he does really like doing Khan Academy on the side, because you can earn the cool badges. And I'm letting him learn coding as "dessert" for math practice.
I do very much, overall, like the "living math" approach to math. I belong to the Living Math yahoo group, and though I don't really participate in the conversations, the ideas I've gleaned from them have been amazing. At the same time, I think people do need to learn the basic "grammar" of arithmetic -- though I want them to have nimble, open, conceptually-creative minds in using it. We tend to be pretty good at that -- in our state-mandated yearly testing, we score well on the "conceptual" portion of the mathematics test in the CAT. Computation: not so much. That's really why we're working with Khan right now -- it's a nice springtime change from our normal routine, but it's also a good run through the actual operations we need to know.
That's also why I'm thinking of pairing Fred with Saxon for the next two years: opposites may not attract, but I think we need to work both sides of the math mind.
Sally
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Willa
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I use Life of Fred as a primary text for my 11 year old, and then I use worksheets (mostly Math Mammoth) to supplement.
We read the whole elementary series several chapters at a time, over the course of the summer, fall, and winter, because it was all review.
Then when we reached Life of Fred: Mineshaft, we slowed down to a chapter a week because it was getting to new information for him. So our schedule goes like this:
Monday: Life of Fred chapter and Your Turn to Play, which we discuss and do together.
Tuesday-Friday: Math Mammoth or other sheets reinforcing the grade-level Life of Fred concept(s) for the week.
So far it's been the best solution for math for us, because my 11 year old does not learn well just from doing problems -- he needs to have the conceptual aspect as well. And he does better when his imagination is engaged.
MEP worked well for my two next-up children (now ages 18 and 21) when they were ages 8 to 12. Saxon didn't work for any of my kids, though I always take them through part of Saxon 65 (in spite of their resistance) at about age 10 because it gives me a chance to see where they still need work. Before age 10, our math instruction is extremely eclectic.
I love Key to Algebra (Key Curriculum Press) for pre-algebra. I don't think it's a high school level course, but for a visual introduction to algebraic concepts in 6th to 8th grade, and as a supplement or consolidation for the more math-anxious of my high schoolers, it's perfect for my family.
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SallyT
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The Key To books are another thought I've got in my mental holding pen. My oldest used them through middle school and into 9th grade, and we like them a lot.
Sally
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Becky Parker
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| Posted: March 31 2014 at 7:30am | IP Logged
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SallyT wrote:
That's also why I'm thinking of pairing Fred with Saxon for the next two years: opposites may not attract, but I think we need to work both sides of the math mind.
Sally |
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I was thinking about this very thing, Sally. My current 4th grader is really struggling with Saxon and I've heard so much about the Fred books that I thought he might enjoy them. I was originally going to go with Rightstart but the price is making me cringe, especially since I have all the Saxon books, through 12th grade, on my shelf! I was also in the process of giving MEP a try but now that I have a working printer I can't get the MEP sight to open.
Care to share how you plan to mix Saxon and Fred?
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SallyT
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| Posted: March 31 2014 at 9:07am | IP Logged
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Well, I could go one of two (or more!) ways. My thought is to work through Saxon Algebra 1/2 slowly -- it's my rising 6th grader I'm thinking of here -- which would take us through a solid review of arithmetic and into some algebraic things *we're already doing in Life of Fred.* That's the thing I do like about Fred -- having worked through the entire elementary series now, and 2/3 of the intermediate books, *I* feel more prepared to tackle algebra! I definitely want to continue through fractions, decimals, etc, and into pre-algebra.
So, idea #1 would be to do Saxon 2-3 days, max, each week, and do Fred the other days. So the week would be like:
M: Fred
T: Saxon
W: Saxon
Th: Saxon again? I'd like to try to do 2 lessons/week, but we could keep it to just one.
F: Fred
OR
I've scheduled in a "math literature" slot in our reading schedules, for things like String, Straight-Edge, and Shadow, Famous Mathematicians, Phantom Tollboth, etc. Possibly I could slot Fred into that place and do Saxon daily, or a mix of Saxon and Khan Academy, which the same child also loves. I really don't want to lose the living math, but I really do think we need the continual arithmetical proficiency that nobody but Saxon seems to provide. It gets kind of relentless, but you sure don't get a chance to forget things.
So I guess in my longer-range vision, Fred is becoming more like a supplement. It is much meatier than it seems, but as we advance, I do want to make sure we've got the computational proficiency down, as well as the conceptual stuff.
MEP is also really good, I have to say. Even so, I'm pondering mixing that with Saxon for my MEP girl in 6th, year after next.
I wish I could be not-schizophrenic about math. My own math experience was such a disaster, growing up, and it's only now that I feel confident at all about dealing with math with my children. I've enjoyed re-learning it from the ground up with these youngest two. And as I say, doing Fred has helped *me* to see that we can do algebra together, when that time comes, which it will sooner than I like to think!
The folks at the Living Math forum really like Art of Problem Solving, by the way. We tried AoPS geometry for my 16-year-old this year, but the wordiness of it, and the focus on math-competition-type problem-solving, just frustrated him -- and he's a very able and motivated student. If he doesn't like something, I really do tend to listen to him and take him seriously, because his M.O. is generally to persevere. So he's now doing Teaching Textbooks Geometry and hoping to slot into college trig next year. I had thought about AoPS pre-algebra, which has been highly recommended, for the younger ones, but the books are fairly expensive, and I'm not sure math-odyssey is quite our style.
Sally
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Becky Parker
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| Posted: March 31 2014 at 5:40pm | IP Logged
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Thank you Sally, that does help. Sorry I'm so dense and didn't see that you had already typed something similar above! 
Regarding MEP, has anyone else had trouble getting onto their sight lately?
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SallyT
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Oh, you're not dense, and I don't mind repeating myself -- I frequently do anyway.
Haven't tried the MEP site very lately -- I have the year's practice books printed out, though I have been perusing it again in the last few weeks, thinking about next year. Not in the last day or so, though.
Sally
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Martha
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I love life of Fred any way we can get it.
I also love MCP mathematics.
Sometimes one or the other is all we do that day.
Sometimes we do both bc LoF is just jolly good fun to read anyways.
No stress required.
For upper level math, I use Lial's BCM and Introductory Algebra bc I lack confidence in my ability to explain LoF. Once they finish Intro Algebra, I do my best to find a decent high school math class for them. Some years I fail bc the options here are limited. (Or I am way too strict in my expectation. I suppose it depends on who you ask.)
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| Posted: May 20 2014 at 8:42pm | IP Logged
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I loathe Saxon.
We started LoF this year on a whim (I had heard about it for years, and was one of only a very few that we had never tried) and my kids LOVED it (I already have one that love-love-loves math, and I didn't think she would want to switch to LoF but yep, she did.
So, yes, after years (and years and years) of trying many many many Math programs, I can say I happily have them use Lof as their Math.
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4Real Forums : Living and Loving Numbers
Topic: Life of Fred Math - Supplement or Primary
