New Math DVD – extended questions

Thank you very much for your reply. I love your encouraging words and I think the main reason I was able to comfortably “sit back” and let my 6 year old “develop a relationship with arithmetic based on his natural curiosity” was because I was able to watch “The Early Years” DVD last year and become cemented in my desire to wait and let him just be a kid a little longer and play and explore and work on habits and all that good stuff. Your suggestions confirmed my internal leanings to “start from the beginning in his formal study” so thank you for that.

I am glad that 4myboys chimed in with her questions about her 11 year old son. Much of what she said is similar with my older 11 year old too. I’ll give a little more background on him as well. We started homeschooling about 2 1/2 years ago. We began with Math U See. I knew he didn’t have all the addition and subtraction facts mastered so we started at the very beginning (Alpha) and worked up from there. I felt the program was laid out really well but over time we found that there was no “fun” in it and the constant drill of the facts made it quickly slip from being a subject he enjoyed to one he just endured. I can see now looking back that it was missing the fun “real life” oral interactions and such and that I was really just trying to move through the curriculum quickly so we could “catch up” and “be on schedule”. At the time however I didn’t know how to fix the problem and thought something more “fun” would help so we moved to Teaching Textbooks as our curriculum. At first he LOVED it. We started with a level (3) that reviewed a bit of what he already knew and he ate it up and zoomed right in. It was like a game to him. Then, when he got into level 4 the novelty had worn off a bit and he got encumbered by the length of the lessons and the tediousness of entering in the answers. If we could have just done some of the problems and not all of them that would have helped but only doing some of the problems would not mark the lesson “complete” which is hard for both his (and my) personalities. I also started getting concerned as to the depth that he was understanding the mechanics of what was going on “behind the scenes” so to speak to arrive at the answer. I started considering switching back to MUS. The concept of division was my main concern. It has been a hard one for my son to master and I think this is because of a side method we used to learn multiplication (where you learn a little story about the facts and have a picture in your mind about it that helps you recall the answer). That method made it super fast for him to learn his multiplication facts but I think sort of backfired with the division because the relationship you develop with numbers was overlooked and the story became central and has made that process harder to relate multiplication to division? We switched back to MUS at that point doing division last year in the Delta level. We also added in Life of Fred at least once a week (and he loved that). MUS was I felt better in that we could customize the lesson length better and move more at his pace. If we wanted to just to 1/2 of the questions on the worksheet that was fine etc. I feel he understands division. He gets what is happening but he still cannot spit out the answers quickly for those facts. To be honest I cannot either, somehow I had a gap in that in my childhood so I have a hard time knowing do we say lets move on, you understand the concept and you can arrive at the answer, or do we say we are going to stay on divison until you can do all the facts within 3 seconds (or so) as MUS would suggest. We are a few lessons away from finishing Delta and next we come face to face with fractions which if I am being honest is where my personal comfort for teaching math begins to waver. I am confident in teaching “off the cuff” or “away from a boxed curriculum” up to this point but I feel I need points of reference from here on out. My son is good at math, I can tell his mind is quick and he often gets it. I hate to see his love for math wain and I start to feel worry when a large concept like dividing facts not being fluently memorized is occurring. I have a hard time knowing do I go back again over division this year working on more memorizing when he indeed understands what is happening and can arrive at the correct answer just not within seconds or do we move forward and just continue to review and practice those facts? I don’t want to beat the joy out of the subject. Did Charlotte require the facts to all be memorized and said within a 3 second (or so) timeframe? Do I use MUS and a starting point and then implement SM approach from there or ??? Do we continue to do most of our stuff orally at this level? I do have the SCM math handbook on my tablet and I have read the first 25 or so pages but when the DVDs arrived I watched all of those and have not yet finished reading. By the way it was SO helpful to me to see rather than read about the process, it cemented it so much for me.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts and time. It takes a lot to respond to questions like these and I am so grateful that you care. I hope your party goes well and congratulations on your growing family :).

P.S. I do also have a 9 year old daughter who I know will LOVE the changes that will be made to the way we do math. She LOVES when we pull away from the math books and “do math” orally and watching the way you did it on the video assured me that math will begin to be a favorite subject for her again this coming year.

Thank you so very much for your helpful reply. I am going to go back and study the sections you mentioned in my book now and work on getting a plan for the coming year. I think you are right about my older son just needing to continue practicing his math facts and we are working on that through the summer and will continue when we pick back up with school in the fall.

I’m saying a prayer for you now! Again, thank you for your wonderful wisdom and help.

Heather