Review: Life of Fred: Ice Cream

Life of Fred: Ice Cream by Stanley F. Schmidt

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I must say, I am a bit disappointed in this book. I am frequently on the watch for books that people use for teaching math and a home-schooling group that I often see sang the praises of this series, so I decided to look into it. I am NOT a home-schooler; I am a substitute teacher. I have not used this book with young children, either, so I cannot discuss their reactions to it. What I can say is that I wasn't all that impressed with the pedagogy. The book has a good story line - or at least I think it probably does. This is not the first book in the series, so it is a bit like jumping in mid-way in a novel and trying to figure out what is going on. The people I have heard talk (write) about these books frequently mention how the kids get involved in the story of them.

Mathematically, though, at first, I thought the book was jumping around between topics WAY too much. I have looked at it again, though, and I think now that it is just some repetition of topics covered in other books and brought up in this one for review. That isn't bad in itself, but it does make the first impression of the book look quite disjointed.

But the biggest disappointment for me is that I found the math to be thin as far as explanatory depth. If the child(ren) this book is used for are able to understand connections, then this is probably OK, but I know a lot of children who would need more. And some of the math notations is puzzling. The use of the sigma notation with children of this age is one example. I subbed recently for 3rd and 4th graders for whom this notation would be completely confusing.

Personally, if I were home-schooling students in math, I would choose Singapore Math over this, but there may be other alternatives that are good, too.



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