Our New Friend Fred - LOF: Apples Ch. 1

After lots of research (and procrastination) we chose to go with Life of Fred for our math!  We are very excited and just finished Chapter 1.  The kids LOVE this book and I always find it in their rooms with their math journals open.  If your kids are sneaking math lessons in while you aren't looking - I would say you have chosen the right book for the job ;)

We start by sitting all together on my bed or the couch or in the backyard (anywhere comfy) and they both have Math Journals.  Their journals are run of the mill notebooks without spiral bindings since the spirals distract Tractor.  They write & draw whatever they want while we very slowly read through the chapter.  We take a few extra minutes at the end of each page for them to finish up what they chose to copy down in their journals and then move on - coming back to whatever they want after we finish the chapter.  There are a few questions at the end of each chapter that we work on and answer in their journals. 

For Chapter 1 we also worked on Math Family mini books (we plan to keep adding to these books) as well as Equation Building Cards that I found in the Target dollar bins.

We used the cards & 7 pennies to figure out the 4 ways you can use addition to equal 7 (I turned the - into + with a black marker to make room for 4 addition equations in ech house).  Then we did the same thing with the numbers reversed to go along with the last question of the chapter.

 

 

 

Math Family Printable from Teachers.net

 

We also made the clock that can be found at Thriving Third Graders.