Your question: the Elementary and Intermediate Series

           First, it's important that you learn Three Ways That Life of Fred Is Different.  (click here)

           As I write the elementary series, I'm imagining my readers somewhere in the 1st-4th grade group depending on their individual readiness. 

         Everyone starts with the beginning of the elementary series: Life of Fred: Apples.   There is much more in each of the books than just learning math facts.  You will miss a lot if you skip ahead. 
     These are not "kiddie books."  Your fourth grader will not be embarrassed reading them. 

        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. 

       In Life of Fred: Farming, among other things, we present the commutative property of set union, the definition of function ("a rule which assigns to each member of the domain exactly one image in the codomain"), several pieces of piano sheet music, the Russell set, oxymorons, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a proof that the Universal set can not exist.

      It will be news to some adults that the Universal set can not exist.

        We are going to have some fun and learn a lot of things.               

      These early books may be read together.  The smaller reader gets to sit on the lap of the bigger person.
      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.

        Each of the books in the elementary and intermediate series will be 128 pages.  Hardbacks—not workbooks.  One copy can be used by all the kids (and grandkids!)

 

       It will take about 16-21 months to complete both the Elementary and Intermediate Series.

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