From Singapore math to MUS??

We’ve not used Singapore.  However I can speak to testing when being a MUS student.  My kids do standardized testing yearly.  What I’ve found is that there are usually a couple problems they aren’t ready to do based on MUS’s different timeline up through about 5th/6th grade.  MUS uses a different order for introducing everything up to PreAlgebra.  However I know they have added in another workbook page now to help compensate for that and it runs more on a ‘common core’ timeline of when to introduce topics.  (We just ignore this extra page per lesson.)

An example for when kids didn’t know what to do – MUS doesn’t cover decimals in depth until Zeta, which often a child reaches around 6th grade (assuming you begin Alpha in 1st).  Standardized tests assume kids know more than how to add and subtract decimals before 6th grade (like understanding how to multiply them).  But what I’ve found is they don’t have a bunch of problems on the skills we’ve not covered yet, so even if my kids totally guess on the multiple choice answer or skip the problem it doesn’t impact their overall score significantly.  (In Ohio you just need to get a 25th percentile composite score on the whole test to pass, which means you can literally fail entirely on a few sections and still pass.  They could skip the math sections totally and still get a passing score for Ohio.) And a note, none of my kids have ever failed the math sections.  I think the lowest score they’ve gotten is one child got a 78% in a math section.  Their composite test score (all sections averaged together) still was above the 95th percentile.

One more note – I generally don’t share my kids results with them unless they ask.  And we begin testing with the reminder that this is just what we do to fulfill the law, we really don’t care what the test results are.  We don’t stress out about them and they don’t change how we’re doing our learning.

We use MUS and have had same experience as Tristen when it comes to testing. We have had no problems and even though learned in a different sequence, as Tristen said only a few problems would be on those concepts, so it worked out.

When DD did her 3rd grade test (when we have to start in our state) DD had only been through Gamma, no division yet. But she had solved for “x” so I showed her what a division problem might look like and explained it is like solving for “x”. She did really well and was not triped up by what she did not know. I explained that some problems she might not know and not to get caught up in those.

I have not switched from Singapore, so far have been with MUS from the start.