Now you will be able to start the Life of Fred series with your child sitting on your lap . . .
. . . and finish the series sitting on his/her lap!
You are ready to start Life of Fred Elementary when...
- You can talk in sentences.
- You are willing to listen to a 5 page story.
- You can hold a pencil.
- You can print the digits 0 to 10
- You know your basic addition and subtraction facts up to 10
Dr. Schmidt recommends that all students up to 4th grade start with Apples and work their way through the entire elementary series.
There are ten books in Elementary Series, available individually or in sets:
1. Apples (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . .
Numbers that Add to 7; Circles; Ellipses; Reading 6:00 on a Clock; 5 + ? = 7; Days of the Week; Leap Years; Spelling February; 15 Degrees Below Zero (-15°); Counting by Fives; 3x + 4x = 7x; ante meridiem (a.m.); One Million; Squares; The "There Are Zero . . ." Game; Sets; the Popularity of Zero; Triangles; ? (not equal); x + 4 = 7; One Thousand; Counting by Hundreds; Reading 3:05 on a Clock; Rectangles.
2. Butterflies (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . .
One Yard = 3 Feet; Numbers that Add to 9; Counting by twos; Reading 5:10 on a Clock; Braces, Parentheses and Brackets; Why Not Every Three Stars Can Make a Triangle; Collinear; Reading 5:55 on a Clock; Ordinal Numbers; Yurts; Half Past Six; a Dozen; Perpendicular; p.m. (post meridiem); Syncope; A Baker's; Dozen; Whole Numbers; Cardinal Numbers; Trillion, Quadrillion and Quintillion; Aleph-null.
3. Cats (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . .
Commutative; Cardinality of a Set; One Quarter; Numerals vs. Numbers; Counting by Threes; Finding Patterns; Right Angles; A Quarter to Three; 5280 Feet in a Mile; Numbers Expressed as Hundreds, Tens and Ones; Sexagesimal and Decimal Systems; Numbers that Add to 13; Centuries, Centenarians, and Centurions; Square Feet; Volume; One Meter; The Three Countries of the World that Don't Primarily Use the Metric System; What Mathematicians Do; Prime Numbers; Less Than (<).
4. Dogs (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . .
One Million; the Game of Doubles; Fortnight; Digits in a Number; Two Dimes = 20 Cents; Doubling 1 ➔ 2 ➔ 4 ➔ up to 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 (which is 100 doubles); 7 - z = 4; Functions; the Function Party Game; One Billion; Making Choices in Life; Finding Patterns; Consecutive Even Numbers; Numbers that Add to 15; Guessing Functions; Right Angles; Rectangles; Constant Functions; Numbers that Add to 17; Bar Graphs; Adding two- and three-digit numbers; Carrying the One in Addition.
5. Edgewood (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . .Concurrent Lines; Parallel Lines; Trapezoids; Right Angles; Functions; Rhombuses; Constant Functions; 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; Greater Than >; Numbers that Add to 8, 10, and 12; State Income Tax Rates as Percents; Parallelograms; Rows and Columns of a Matrix; Quarter of an Hour; Half Dozen; The Addition Game Using Playing Cards; Playing Guess-A-Function; Six Examples of Functions: Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Tangent, and Derivative; What It Means to Matriculate.
6. Farming (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . . Adding to 14; Googol; Percents; Adding to 16; Rows of a Matrix; Median Average; Union of Sets; All of Mathematics Generated by the Empty Set; Proof that the Set of Everything (the Universal Set) Cannot Exist; Cardinality of a Set; Collinear Points; Numbers vs. Numerals; Borrowing One in Subtraction; Definition of Function; Domain and Codomain; Radius and Ulna; Dollars in Different Denominations.
7. Goldfish (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . . Drawing Things to Scale; Digits in a Number; the Whole Point of Math; Polygons; Sequences; Definition of an Acre; Meters vs. Yards; Kilograms vs. Pounds; Area of a Rectangle; Cubic Feet into Gallons; Gallons of Water into Pounds; Multiplying by Ten, Hundred, and Thousand; One Ton = 2000 lbs.
Decimal Point; Estimating Sums; Practicing the Metric System with Dental Floss; Bar Graphs.
8. Honey (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . . Commutative Law of Multiplication; Closed Under Addition; Quarter of an Hour; Cardinal Numbers; d = rt; One Trillion; Exponents; 1½ + 1½; Is This a Function; Long Division; Fractions; Remainders; Dividing 56382 by 3; Changing 82614 feet into Yards; Three Reasons to Learn Long Division (Even Though Calculators Exist); 36 Quarters Equals How Many Dollars?; The Fur Times Table; A Disadvantage to Being Married to a Calculator; The Guess-a-Function Game; Hexagons and Octagons; The Big Question in Arithmetic#8212;Do I Add, Subtract, Multiply, or Divide? Division by Two-digit Numbers; 7xyz + 8xyz; Slope of a Line.
9. Ice Cream (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . . The Big Question in Arithmetic; Multiplying Two-digit Numbers; A Pound of Hamburger Weighs More Than a Pound of Gold; The Last Ten Multiplication Facts; How to Remember 7X8 = 56; Sigma Notation; Subtracting 12 oz. from 15 lbs.; Bar Graph; Ordered Pairs; Elapsed Time; First and Second Coordinates; Why Algebra Does Not Use the Times Sign (X); The Cardinality of the Set of All Ice Cream Flavors that Begin with the Letter Alpha; Minutes and Hours in the Metric System; Plotting Points on a Graph; Perimeter; The One Reason for Mathematics; Hooke's Law; Slope of a Line; Estimating Using Graphs; Changing the Scale on a Graph; Counting Back Change; The Commutativity of Set Union; Less Than (<) and Greater Than (>); Area of a Rectangle.
10. Jelly Beans (Sample pages): This book covers beginning mathematics including . . . Finding One-third of a Number; Using Fisher's Exact test; Prime Numbers; Fibonacci Numbers; Casting Out Nines; Seven to the One-thousandth; Power in Three Steps; Intersection of Sets; Commutativity of Intersection; Decimal Points; Adding Decimals; Logs; Median Averages; Mean Averages; Exponents; Set Subtraction; Reducing Fractions; Milli- and Kilo-; Tally Marks; Pie Charts; Mode Average; Subtracting Three Inches from Three Miles.