Could you expand more on leaving space but more importantly could you speak more on inspiring this love and desire? What did you do in your mom? What skills did they develop to be able to learn so much on their own? My kids just want to play mostly. They do need skills and motivation to do this type of learning you describe.

So each girl brought 2-3 books with them as proposed books, and then the girls voted on which one they’d start with (They’re doing Matilda now), with the clause that the moms had to approve each book they read. 🙂 It was fun to see the variety. A few of the titles were: Freckles, Ten Girls Who Changed the World, Land of Stories, Because of Winn-Dixie, David Livingstone biography, The Magician’s Nephew, Ballet Shoes.

Hi Elizabeth, as I look back at their littler years, I wish I would have simplified a bit more. I did reading, writing, math, spelling, plus history and a bit of science, with workbooks, etc. and I think it was just a bit much for their young age. I wish I would have relaxed a bit more on the “electives” and just focused more on the 3 R’s. It was 2 years ago that I felt like we were losing our “love of learning” so I scaled way back, changed MY attitude, and it’s been so much better!

Hi Cindy! Yeah, great question–math has always been our biggest challenge. Neither of my kids LOVE math, but we do use Life of Fred and they LOVE Fred! They are happy to do the questions/work because they still see it as better than the alternative (workbooks). I do supplement it with “two-minute drills” which are just quick run throughs of math facts (multiplication, division, etc.) since LoF doesn’t do much by way of drills. What I love about LoF is, as you said, the connection to real-life applications. Because both my kids are more literary than numbers-driven, LoF is a huge blessing for us. And they appreciate the humor!

What do you do for Math? That is one I have been hesitant to make a ‘must do’ because I fear it makes math haters out of so many kids, and I have never seen workbooks or texts that teach what I see as relevant to kids, so it seems like work for work’s sake. Life of Fred has funny stories, but my kids (not having done any forced math sheets) still would prefer to skip the questions and see them as an interruption to the story. 🙁 How have you found your kids interest in math? Dutch seems like the type that might get joy just from figuring out the answer and seeing that he can do it.