Living Math?

When discussing pleading with Noah last week, about how he NEEDS to memorize those multiplication facts, a thought occured to me….
Why is it so difficult for him to come up with the correct answer on a worksheet, but I KNOW he knows them (at least most of them). 
… to look at his worksheet you would think he knows nothing about multiplication.    Here’s the (in my mind) strange thing.  If we are having a conversation – he can multiply without skipping a beat.  
Things like this.  “Noah, here is your medicine.” and my mom gives him five children’s tylenol.  He says, “Will they last 20 hours?”  Just. like. that.  If he had  4(the number of hours the medicine last), so 4 times 5 = ___ on his paper it would have taken a few minutes.   This happens all the time!  So, I jokingly, asked if I had to come up with a story for each of his harder math facts.  He said that would be very helpful! 
First of all, I am not that creative.  So, my next step was to research to see what was out there.  Can you believe I was not disappointed?  It has a name… Living Math. 
Honestly, I am not sure why I hadn’t thought of it earlier, cause I am all about “reading for learning” method by using living books instead of textbooks. themselves. 
Much to Noah’s delight, we will be playing math games,  reading math stories, and using Life of Fred.  This set of math books looks awesome, I had no idea someone had come up with a way to learn math by telling stories and funny ones at that! Certainly saves me from doing it…

Some Living math books listed by categories can be found here and here.

The only books we have done so far are these types of books.

 

 

We will still be using our CLE Math in addition to our Living Math method… for now anyway.  Oh, and using Life of Fred means he will write the answers to the problems down in his Math Notebook, so he does write down answers to problems.  This way just seems to be more up his alley…we shall see.