Review Detail

When I first looked at LOF it seemed that people were clearly divided into 2 camps…. you either love it or hate it. I read the reviews on Amazon and based on some of the reviews I felt like I should pre-read them before letting my kids start LOF. We all started in Apples. At first I thought there was no way there was enough math in LOF to make it a stand alone curriculum. It seems to build very slowly in the early elementary books. After reading a number of them I realized the author was doing was focusing each book on one or 2 addition facts, trying to instill those basics solidly and to memory of the child. By the 8th book (honey) the child is expected to know all the multiplication facts. They are asked to make honey cards (flash cards) and practice regularly. Parents are also encouraged to quiz their child in day to day activities (like driving to the store) on the addition and multiplication facts. I found that several of my friends who were using LOF and didn't feel like their children were grasping the concepts were not doing the additional practice times outside the reading time of LOF. I found that when it came to long division I need to give my child a few more practice problems than what was covered in the book as he wasn't remembering what exactly he was suppose to do to get to the answer. But by supplementing a few more problems he remembered the steps and had a good grasp of the concepts.

Once the books get into the middle school/high school levels the amount of math is drastically increased and moves much faster (it's presumed that the child has a solid understanding and foundation from what was covered slowly in the previous books) There are still the entertaining stories about Fred except in the expanded volumes (the expanded books I believe start in Algebra) contain no stories, just practice problems (along the lines of the drill and kill the author is opposed to) to ensure your child understands the math concept. (In other words the Algebra book contains the stores and math situations and the secondary expanded book is just practice problems to supplement the initial volume. The expectation is not that the child will do all the problems in the expanded version but that there are additional problem so the child can do as many as necessary to have a firm understanding of how to do that particular kind of algebra equation). From the beginning the author states that he expects the child to read and figure out what is going on, although that is easy in the early books, it is sometimes extremely difficult in the higher level books, given that there are times he presents a math situation but doesn't explain how to do the math problem until a few pages later (sometimes the next chapter). For some kids their learning style will allow them to study what is happening and figure out how the answer was derived, but if your child is a visual learner who needs to be shown how to do a problem first they are going to have difficulty understanding the concept and may get frustrated. For those who fall in that category, LOF will be a great review and good way to reinforce the concept once they have been taught and learned how to handle the concept being presented.