I am very slowly going through Life of Fred – Farming, and in deed all these books, which are to all intents and purposes too young for my eldest, and possibly for my youngest. But there is something about them that makes me stoically continue on. The girls do ACE maths everyday, so I am confident that they are doing enough maths for their age group. Life of Fred is our fun, hands on, bringing it alive maths!
Each book I now pick one or two topics to focus on. For Farming I chose graphing and sets. I am writing this post after the fact (waaay after the fact). So it probably won’t be as comprehensive as it might have been had I written it at the time. Hey ho. I shall do my best!
The first thing we did before moving onto Farming is to complete the homemade revision booklet from the book before. The Life of Fred – Edgewood revision booklet was easy for the girls. And I could see they understood everything we had covered so far:
Life of Fred – Farming: Sweetie Graphs
I had grabbed a bag of sweets during my weekly shop. I gave them to the girls, along with some sticky notes, a huge piece of card and some rope:
Having graphed with them before, I let them graph the sweets in a way that made sense to them:
They used the rope for the axis and the sticky notes for the labels:
They were easily able to make deductions about the different colours and their amounts:
Life of Fred – Farming: Sets and sweeties
Firstly, I cut some of the sweets into half to give us another variation. I then asked the girls to arrange into two sets. They chose cut and uncut sweets:
The plate denotes AuB (A union B) which the girls added one of each colour both cut and uncut. I introduced AnB (A intersected with B). I explained that the two sets were entirely different. This meant that there were no sweets which belonged in A and in B (AnB):
I chose another two sets, this time two I knew we could intersect. The first group was cut sweeties and the second group was purple sweeties. This was a great choice! I could show the girls that the packet of sweeties was a whole set. In creating groups we needed to take into account all of the sweeties in the set. Any that weren’t in the two groups were placed around the circles but still on the card. I over lapped the two groups:
I explained that the over lap is meant to contain all of the sweeties which were cut and purple ie met both the groups characteristics:
They got this concept very quickly:
Life of Fred – Farming: Harder Set Work
We had been doing some classifying from our Botany unit study using PlayMobil. I thought that these toys would make a perfect collection for us to divide for some set work:
The girls set up a standard piece of card with two groups marked out using rope:
I asked them to separate out the contents of the houses into furniture and non furniture groups:
Easy Peasy! Then I asked for living room furniture and bathroom furniture:
I wanted to see if they remembered that the rest of the set (ie everything else in the houses) would be placed outside the two circles. They did:
Then I asked for groups of living room and furniture:
They noticed that some of the living room contents could also be in the furniture group. I asked them how they could demonstrate this. They chose to show an intersection between group A and B (AnB):
I wrote out all the denotions so the girls could get used to seeing the correct way of writing things:
I asked them to create their very own demonstration. They chose a set of ‘contents in the kitchen’. Group A was non green utensils and group B was green utensils. They placed the rest of the contents on the outside of the ropes:
I asked for AuB:
They pulled out one of each type of utensil from each group:
To finish I read a simple sets book which explains things very simply. I know we will cover this in more depth in the future.
For more maths posts take a look at these pages:
Other Life of Fred Booklets to Download:
Life of Fred Butterflies Review Booklet
An eleven page booklet covering basic addition and subtraction; sets; time; feet and inches; collinear points; money; ordinal and cardinal numbers
Life of Fred Cats Review Booklet
A ten page booklet covering counting in threes; fractions (quarter); money; patterns; odds and evens and right angles
Life of Fred Dogs Review Booklet
This is a thirteen page booklet containing lots of activities to remember adding doubles. Your children will never forget a double again!
An eight page booklet containing revision with maps, functions and quadrilaterals
Anytime math can be completed with candy is a good time.
Yes, it’s astonishing what you can achieve with sugar!