Planning your math minutes

How old/what grade is your student in?

I always correct math immediately (at the end of their lesson) and we work through anything incorrect right away. I don’t like to wait and then forget, haha.

Are they learning a new concept daily? We use Math U See. With Math U See it usually works out that about every other week (or week depending on the concept) they learn a new concept. They then spend 2-3 days just working on the new concept, followed by 3-4 days of reviewing everything they have learned so far. Because they are learning new concepts slowly, then reviewing, there is usually only one day that is a bit “slower” as they learn something new, the rest of the days build on that lesson so I don’t have to teach math daily.

I also offer help to my kids during their lesson, if I hear them getting “flustered” I will ask if they need help, or need to talk out the problem. Often they know what to do, but get caught up thinking too hard and confuse themselves. They just need a bit of encouragement to not get “bogged down”. Math usually takes about 20 minutes (6th and 4th and my 1st grader usually takes only about 5-10 minutes) and then to review any corrections takes 5-10 minutes depending on what it was. That is about 30 minutes for the entire math lesson.

I grew up doing Saxon, and my mom often would have us do either the odd or even problems, not every problem or the lessons would take a long time. Feel free to not do an entire lesson. 🙂

I used to have them correct all their problems.  Now I make a judgement call and only have them correct the problems where they obviously don’t understand the concept.  So we skip over the small calculation errors.