4-H Clothing Projects

Here are a couple of photos.  I'll be uploading more tomorrow . . . I've run out of time for today .

We have been working on photography projects and sewing projects recently.  I'll post pictures of the kids sewing next week.  For now here are some of their pictures.  Only Rebecca and Joseph did photography.  Rebecca has done it for 3 years, but Joseph just started.  Since I am NOT a photographer, I am of little help to them.  If you are a photogpher and have suggestions, they would love for you to comment.

The Life of Fred by Stanley F. Schmidt, Ph.D.

I debated on whether to write this as a book review or to include it here with school.  I decided to write it here because it has dramatically changed the attitudes of my oldest 4 children regarding math. 

The Life of Fred is a math series that I begin in about the 5th grade.  It covers every necessary math subject through graduation and some that would be totally optional.  It is totally self-directed and non-consumable.  This means that the kids do it themselves and when they are done, I can pass the book down to the next child - a big bonus for our family.  I do look over their work and we talk about it each day at their one-on-one.  This is like no other math program I have ever seen and my kids love it.  Here is an excerpt from A Note to Parents on page 8 of the Fractions book:

You know what arithmetic books look like.  They are all pretty much alike.  Using very few words, they give a couple of examples and then have the students do a hundred identical problems . . . And for students, arithmetic becomes as much fun as cleaning up their rooms, eating yams, or going to the dentist. . . .

The book, The Life of Fred: Fractions, takes a slightly (slightly - in the sense that fish swim slightly better than rocks) different approach.  It tells a story - a story of one day in the life of a five-and-a-half-year-old-boy.  All of the math arises out of Fred's life.  All of it is motivated - right down to when Fred (in chapter 23) is working at the PieOne pizza place, and he's trying to decide whether to put the tomatoes on the pizza before or after it's cooked, and we get the commutative law. . . .

Like all of the books in the Life of Fred series, the emphasis is on how to learn by reading.  Let the book do most of the teaching.  You can relax.  As students progress through high school, college, and graduate school, they find that less and less is learned in the classroom lecture format.  Increasingly, it's the written word that does the teaching. . . .

The book of fractions has 32 chapters.  I thought this would be good for about a year, but I didn't realize that my kids would love math sooooo much that they would do a chapter a day instead of a chapter a week.  They really do enjoy it that much.  And they are learning, too - applying mathematical concepts to their own lives as they have seen Fred do in the book.  My oldest daughter is a junior in high school and she enjoys the stories as much as my 6th grade son. 

I had the algebra 1 book evaluated by a math curriculum specialist for a very large school district in our area.  She found it very entertaining and lacking in nothing - mathematically speaking.  She even purchased the book for some high school students that were having difficulties in math because she felt the stories would teach better than traditional methods.  I cannot say enough positive about this series.  If you are wondering whether your children will ever like math, you might consider The Life of Fred as an alternative.