In the early grades "living math" is easier to come up with and implement. But in the middle-upper grades many moms wonder if it can be done. It can be! I mostly use a traditional math text, but every opportunity I can find, I insert or substitute that lesson with a living math lesson. This semester, we've stepped away from Saxon Math completely  Instead we are focusing on math fact mastery and other math topics that don't require heavy calculations. We're going through a book called Word Problems with Fractions. We'll also do geometry, measurements, and probability.

Kyle is currently working on ratios, percents, and fractions. If the World Were a Village  is perfect practice for ratios  and some of the other math topics he's working on right now. I found this at the library and I'm so glad that I did. At the time of this printing the world's population was 6 billion. But 6 billion is almost unfathomable. So the book condenses the world population to a village of 100. Each person actually representing 65 million people. For example: 13% of the world's population has a car. This number has a bigger effect when you realize that in a village of 100 only 13 have cars! It has lots of neat and interesting facts, and a ton of opportunities to practice ratios, fractions, and percents. How I use the book:

• What fraction of the people have cars?
• What fraction of the people don't have cars? 
• How many people have cars in the world?
• How many people don't have cars in the world?
• What percentage of the people have cars?
• What percentage of the people don't have cars?
• What is the ratio of people to cars?
• What is the ratio of the world population to villagers?