Math help please

Okay, I would suggest Math U See for several reasons.

1. Mastery based.

2. Hands on manipulatives for figuring out the answer to those math facts. My response to a child who is hemming and hawing, asking me for help with a fact, etc, is “Build it.” They literally grab the pieces and do it.

3. Not a large number of problems. Generally a day’s worksheet has 12-20 problems. (12 problem pages are more involved problems, like long division or a word problem with several steps). 3 of those pages in a chapter are just on the new concept they are learning. Do 1 page or do all 3 that week if needed. Then the next 3 pages available have the new concept and a mix of practice problems for past concepts. Again, you can do 1 review page or all 3 if needed over the week. The tests are set up exactly like the review pages, some problems on the new concept and some review problems, so it is up to you if you even bother using the tests in the younger years or if you just designate doing well on a review page as passing the lesson.

As for taking a break – I did it with my oldest for 6 months in late 2nd grade. We were using Saxon and having tears every day, so we dumped it and just forgot math existed. Then in 3rd grade we started Math U See from the very beginning in Alpha. She’s 10th grade now and doing Geometry this year, we just did math semi-consistently over summers too (we always do for all kids, even if it is just review) and she caught up to where she traditionally would have been a couple years ago. Then summer math became mostly review instead of new lessons.

I don’t know anything about mastery programs, except I tried Mammoth Math with my son and found that he mastered addition superbly and then we moved on to subtraction, which at the end began to include addition as well and that is when I learned that he had mastered subtraction and promptly forgot everything about addition. He looked at me like he had never seen addition before. I had to pull out older work and prove he had!! So, I quickly got him back on a spiral program.  I was then playing catch up because I felt like we had just lost so much time and wasted so much energy. I hated hated hated flashcards as a kid and as an adult still dislike them a lot, so I was looking for something unique because obviously my son’s memory is crap. I blame his father…. LOL  selective memory I say… Anyway, I was successful…. I found a DVD called Times Tales to teach multiplication / Division facts and it has been a God send!! I used it with both my kids and to this day neither have any problems recalling their facts and I never touched a flash card!!  Oh and the Times Tale taught them in about 2-3 weeks. I loaned the DVD to a friend and she had her public school daughter watch it over the Christmas holidays and when she went back the teacher was so impressed, she wanted to know what the mom did.  So, I would highly recommend it for sure regardless of what math curriculum you go with. It really only teaches the harder ones, you still have to teach the 0’s, 1’s, 2’s, 5’s, 10’s, & 11’s, but those are so easy most kids get them pretty fast.

Hope this helps you.

We use right start math and I really like it and I feel like my daughter (who gets easily distracted in general) is learning a lot with it. She applies what she has learned in real life situations without any prompting – she is making connections on her own, which I love! I find the lessons to be long, but Im breaking the longer ones up into two days. Anyways, they have a math games book that you can I think buy separately, and I find that it’s a good reinforcement of the basics. There are literally hundreds of games in the book, mostly played with cards (we use the number cards that came in the set but you could probably use regular cards). It’s a fun way to reinforce addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.