Answers to two popular questions:

1) When should my child start the series?

2) What is Fred's Home Companion?

ANSWERS

1)  When should my child start the series?

The answer to this question has changed recently.

    Life of Fred: Fractions used to be the first book in the series.  It presupposes that the reader knows three things:

          i) the addition tables            What's 5 + 8?

          ii) the multiplication tables        What's 7 times 8?

          iii) long division            What's 6231 divided by 93?

     There is no hurry to begin Life of Fred: Fractions.  As a parent, you have ten or eleven years to gradually introduce addition, multiplication and long division.  By the time your child is in, say, the fifth grade, the addition and multiplication facts will be memorized if it is gradually taught over the years. 

     What's to be avoided is beating the addition and multiplication tables into the child's head.  Life of Fred: Fractions is a reward for learning the tables.

======================

       Recently, we have introduced the Elementary Series for Life of Fred for readers who are not ready to begin Life of Fred: Fractions yet.

       Everyone in that group of readers is encouraged to start with the first of the elementary books: Life of Fred: Apples. There is much more in each of the books than just learning math facts. 
           As I write the elementary series, I'm imagining my readers somewhere in the K-4th grade group depending on their individual readiness. 
        For example, here is a more extensive list of what we'll learn in the first book: Circles, Ellipses, Reading 6:00 on a Clock, 5 + ? = 7, Days of the Week, Leap Years, Spelling February, Dressing for Cold Weather, 15 Degrees Below Zero (–15º), Deciduous Trees, Deciduous Teeth, Counting by Fives, 3x + 4x = 7x, Archimedes 287 B.C. Wrote The Sand Reckoner and Got Killed Being Rude, ante meridiem (a.m.), Donner and Blitz in German, One Million, Euclid Wrote The Elements, Squares, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, Whales Are Not Fish, The “There Are Zero . . .” Game, Sets, the Popularity of Zero, Why Boats Are Cheaper to Rent in the Winter, Triangles, Herbivores and Carnivores, the Colors of the Rainbow, a King in Checkmate, the Story of the Titanic, ≠ (not equal), x + 4 = 7, One Thousand, Counting by Hundreds, Reading 3:05 on a Clock, Rectangles.

And by the second book we really start to get serious:  One Yard = 3 Feet, Numbers that Add  to 9, Counting by twos, Reading 5:10 on a Clock, Facts about Butterflies, Chrysalis vs. Cocoon, Braces, Parentheses and Brackets, Christina Rossetti, Sheet Music for “But Not Alone,”  Domenico Fetti’s Archimedes Thoughtful, Exclamation Points, Bad Things about Sugar, One Good Thing about Sugar, Marvin Stone’s Invention of the Paper Straw 1888, Orion’s Belt, Betelgeuse, Why Not Every Three Stars Can Make a Triangle, Collinear, Reading 5:55 on a Clock, Book Signings, Why You Can Not Walk In a Room, Deliberate vs. Inadvertent, How to Say Toenail in German, Ordinal Numbers, Yurts, Half Past Six, a Nebula is Not a Star, Light Years, the Alphabet Game, a Dozen, Perpendicular, p.m. (post meridiem), Syncope, Sheet Music for “The Crash of the Bell Tower,” Quotation Marks inside of Quotation Marks, A Baker’s Dozen, Spine of a Book, Naissance, Lie vs. Lay, Whole Numbers, Cardinal Numbers, Trillion, Quadrillion and Quintillion, Aleph-null, Kingie’s Brothers, States that Begin with the Letter M, ∞, Saying Thank You, Virgil’s Aeneid, History of Pizza, How to Set a Table.

              Many adults are not that acquainted with many of these topics. 
               
         These early books may be read together.  Smaller one gets to sit on the lap of the bigger one.
          Starting with the Life of Fred: Fractions book, we are looking for the student to read the material on his/her own.
          When they get to Life of Fred: Linear Algebra (which follows calculus) whose lap is bigger may have changed.

=========================

     “How do you teach them the tables?” you might ask.

     There are lots of fun ways.  Much of it occurs in daily living, if you consciously mix in a little arithmetic.  Count the socks.  Measure out three cups of flour.  Count by twos.  Count by fives. 

    When my daughters and I had a trip in the car, we would play the game I called Questions.  It was wildly popular with them.  I had questions about everything.  Question number one: What color do you get when you mix blue and yellow paint?  Question number two: Name two constellations in the sky.  Question number three: What's seven times four?  Question number five: What's the green stuff in plants called?  Question number six: If a curb is painted red, what does that mean?  Question number seven: Doubling what number will give you 14?

     The younger daughter always had first crack at each question.  If she couldn't get it, then the older daughter could try. 

     Sometimes we'd get through 30 questions before the trip was over.  They would sometimes ask to continue the game after we got out of the car, but I would refuse.  It became something they looked forward to when we were in the car. 

     I would repeat about 30% of the questions on future trips.  They learned that trees that lost their leaves in winter were deciduous, and the green stuff in plants is called chlorophyll. 

     When my older daughter Jill took her college-entrance exam, she told me that she nearly laughed out loud.  One of the questions was, “Name the green stuff in plants.” 

                 my daughter Jill

   Let them have a happy childhood.

2)  What is Fred’s Home Companion?

It is lots of things. Ever since

     Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra,
     Life of Fred: Advanced Algebra, and
     Life of Fred: Trigonometry

were first published, I have received requests from home schoolers, teachers, and adults for a study guide to accompany these Life of Fred books. The three books pictured below are a response to those needs.

Need #1: I’m a home schooler and I would like my Life of Fred chopped up into daily bite-sized pieces.
      Done! Fred’s Home Companion offers you daily assignments. In the space of
one summer, for example, you can finish all of Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra and still have plenty of time to do other things.

Need #2: I’m an adult working my way through your Life of Fred and I’d
like the answer key for the end-of-the-chapter problems. In the Life of Fred book you give the answers to only half the problems.
      Done! Here is the answer key.

Need #3: I’m in need of a lot of practice. Although you have a lot of
problems for me to work on in Life of Fred, I want a bunch more. I really
want to pound it into my head.
      Done! In this book we supply a ton of additional problems. Finish all of
these problems in addition to the ones in Life of Fred, and you should be able to join Fred as a professor of mathematics at KITTENS University.