Customer Reviews
Arkman of SC, 5/27/2011
I am writing this as a 5th grader who doesn't normally like math. This hilarious math book allows young boys and girls to learn math while enjoying a funny story. The math problems can sometimes be frustrating but, the funny things that happen to Fred throughout the story make up for that. This book is not to hard to read story-wise but some may find the word problems to be challenging. I like that I had many chances at the end of sections to get things right.
Fred, One Heck of A Math Student
Julie of Vancouver, WA, 1/29/2011
Life of Fred is so out of the box it is hard to wrap your brain around. A math book, with a limited number of problems, written as a story, from the perspective a five year old boy, who is a genius, and the little genius toddles about Kittens University solving fractional problems. Unusual? You bet! Memorable absolutely. My daughter absolutely loved doing Life of Fred Fractions, it is a fun read. Conversely my son, despite the high entertainment value, prefers a traditional just the facts approach to math and did not care for this at all.
Life of Fred is authored by Stanley Schmidt, whom based on some email conversations is quite a character himself. The idea behind this, so far as I can tell, is that the story presenting the math concept becomes more memorable for the student thus a fewer problems are needed to master a particular topic. I can tell you this has certainly been the case for my daughter, which has been rather remarkable.
Life of Fred is laugh out loud funny and certainly provides an unusual avenue for learning fractions. My concern here is there are so few problems and it may not be enough. So far as I know this is the only math curricula with this approach thus the waters are untested. It is hard to determine if it actually is enough, while Dr. Schmidt has assured me it is I opt to do an additional text along side just to be sure.