Math Lessons For A Living Education: Level 2

We wrapped up our Math curriculum early this year and went on to a different one that has been a hit with my little dude. If you are a fan of living books, then you are going to love the Masterbooks Math Lessons For A Living Education: Level 2.

Math Lessons For A Living Education: Level 2

Math Lessons for a Living Education: Level 2 is considered a second grade or for ages 6-8. I’ve been using this with my upcoming 1st grader and he loves it. It does offer a very gentle approach so that the student doesn’t feel overwhelmed and the lessons are overall fairly quick.

Through this book, you get to read a story about two children Charlotte and Charlie. They just arrived back from spending the summer at their grandparents farm and are ready to start school. As they learn with hands-on experience, so does your student.

Meet Charlie & Charlotte

Upon opening you the math book, you’ll find a daily scheduled. This is something that I really love about Masterbooks, and the schedules are so easy to adjust to fit your family. This book also has a list of manipulative suggestions to be prepared before starting. Not to worry though. This isn’t a list where you have to go out and purchase expensive items. This is a list of things that you have around your home and from the pages included in the back of the book.

Examples of what’s included

• Large index cards
• Crayons
• Hole Punch
• Poster board
• Dried beans, buttons, craft sticks, etc.
• Simple Indoor/Outdoor thermometer

For those that already homeschool, chances are we already have all this stuff on hand.

Also, with the purchase of the book, there is a downloadable answer key available online. I really appreciate it being a downloadable resources since chances are we won’t use it a ton with this book. It is handy to be able to reference though in times where you aren’t sure what exactly they are asking you to do during a lesson.
What’s Covered

Throughout this book, your student will learn about numbers, shapes, place value, adding and subtracting. They will practice skip counting, word problems, counting money & measuring. They will also learn about the seasons, geography, and the love of family. You can go HERE to check out the Scope and Sequence.

So far my little guy has created a calendar (using a template in the book), and he puts a star to mark off his day. We also created a cover for his calendar. For every new month, he draws a picture at the top and we number the calendar. This is great practice on writing his numbers and learning to use a calendar.

Also, one day it asked him to make a few flash cards. He did an awesome job. He is the type of kid that writes small and he insisted that the numbers needed to be small and in the top corner of the index card.

We’ve also made a clock (using pages from the book), a leaf rubbing activity and so much more! This book also includes copy work which I think is great.

Overall thoughts:

Overall my upcoming first grader looks forward to this math daily. It isn’t as time consuming as the math we have used in the past and we really love the hands-on learning with manipulatives. As a mom, I really like that it doesn’t “feel” like a math book. It’s brightly-colored with great illustrations. Not one time has my little guy felt over-whelmed or intimidated by the pages. Also, the “Quizzes” or reviews are in the form of “letters to family and friends”, so basically they even see it as a quiz.

Since this is a gentle approach, we do plan on adding to this as the year goes on. Before starting this book, we were already doing carry addition, with that being said every so often, I will be adding additional worksheets into our lessons for practice.

If you aren’t sure which book you should start with when it comes to your child, you can go HERE for a placement test.

Math Lessons For A Living Education: Level 2 at Masterbooks for $29.59.