There are changes happening regarding my homeschooled children’s learning of the subject of math.
The first and most thrilling is that I am thrilled to say goodbye to Singapore Math! There are three reasons for the switch.
My younger son (age 9, grade 4) has been looking at his older brother doing
Teaching Textbooks for the last year. This was our family’s first experience with Teaching Textbooks. It was also the first time using a program on the computer that teaches via lecture and moving animation. As the homeschooling mother, with Teaching Textbooks I am out of the loop completely. For the first time, last year I was not teaching my older son math. The program teaches it to my son. After a few years of trying to nudge that son to do more work independently and having him refuse he actually loved being taught by the program.
The reason I switched my older son to Teaching Textbooks math was I was telling my husband about the program during dinner last August and he said he wanted our older son to try it. I had already purchased the next level of math from the company I loved that my son also liked (Math-U-See). For the first time my husband made a curriculum decision. I said something about buying a second program for $120 was double spending and wasteful but my husband said he didn’t mind in this case as Teaching Textbooks sounded so appealing to him; he loved the idea of how the program taught.
A cool aspect to the program that my husband especially liked was that the math problems are done one at a time and the answer is put into the computer and the student gets instant feedback about whether the answer was correct or not. This prevents the student from doing a whole lesson with the wrong procedure. That is a major issue with textbook (paper) math systems that I recall as being a problem from my use of such programs in public school. I also recall doing pages of math problems and handing them in to be corrected but the teacher not handing them back for 3-4 days so that meant that al the math I did (or other kids did) was wrong for all those day’s lessons.
Another thing my husband loved was that if the child gets an answer wrong and doesn’t understand why the program will be worked out step by step on the screen for the student to observe and learn from (if the student clicks on the button so the program does so).
In the past I had made all homeschool curriculum decisions and my husband wanted no part of making any decisions about it. I am not math phobic and enjoyed math in school, finding it easy to do without much effort (except geometry which actually required effort and studying). My husband is excellent in math and due to his better education than my public school education; he was taking college classes in Calculus while still in private (parochial) high school. He took advanced math in college and loved every minute of it, Calculus being fun for him. (To explain further one downside to my own public school education was we had a new middle school with vigorous programs. I passed Algebra I in Grade 8 which had me on a track with “honors” students (now called AP classes). However the high school was not vigorous and I was told they didn’t have enough math teachers to give all 9th graders Algebra 2 who qualified for it. Because I had parents who did NOT advocate for me at all my guidance counselor plunked me in Algebra I again, repeating the whole darned thing in Grade 9. That put me in Track 2, which was not the Track 1 Honors Track, it was just the Track for college. That meant too that when it came time to take Calculus, I was “off schedule” and was told “you don’t really need it as most colleges don’t require it”. So in high school I took Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry and Trigonometry. In case you are wondering, Track 3 in our school was for students who were D students or failing in classes who would immediately begin working for minimum wage after high school graduation in retail or a factory job, or that would attend a trade school such as to be a hairdresser or an electrician. Those kids were flagged from way back in middle school as bordering on failing and were “not smart enough for college”. (Sorry if that sounds harsh but I’m being honest and actually am holding back some of the other facts that are more harsh but are still true.)
One thing my husband wants for our sons is to not slack in math and for them to “get it” and to hopefully find it easy and not to be afraid of math. We also have our kids on a college track. So far all the jobs that our children have voiced an interest in do require a four year college degree and actually both kids are pretty sure they want to do jobs that will require higher degrees than a Bachelor’s Degree. So my job as homeschool mom is to make sure I get my kids ready for what THEY want to do with their lives.
Anyhow my point to share all that about my older son using Teaching Textbooks (TT) is that in the last couple of months my younger son has been saying he wished he could do TT too.
In the last year we have been using Singapore Math for my younger son. At this point he hates it because he feels it is too simple and too easy and that he feels “like a baby” with their easy problems and cartoon decorations in the curriculum. Because I used their placement tests as a gauge, and because I made him do that level to start with, he was basically doing math he already mastered, 90% of the time. He was learning “their way” of presenting material though. He was learning to do more in his head, more mental calculation instead of focusing on needing to do the operations on paper. So I hope it was not all for naught.
Due to the
scope and sequence of Singapore Math, they teach the metric system and fractions a bit earlier than my son’s former program which was Math-U-See. So although he was in grade 3 he tested to start at Singapore Math level 2A. Last year he completed 2A, 2B, and 3A. He is bored to death.
A problem that still exists for my younger son was the thing he was stuck on learning in Math-U-See (double digit multiplication) was not yet taught in Singapore 2A, 2B, or 3A. So a year has gone by, he has done lots of math but never got to that math operation to learn it Singapore’s way. So what progress has been made? I was feeling angry about it. I’m trying to console myself by saying that three things are good. What he accomplished was: 1. Metric system learned, 2. Simple fractions learned and 3. More mental calculation of math operations was done.
After years of hearing how great Singapore Math is I had that feeling of “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” thing happening. Whenever a homeschool mom would sing the praises of Singapore Math I’d wonder if I made an error by choosing Math-U-See. I tried to console myself with the fact that because Math-U-See was working for my kids then they were just fine. Well now we’ve used Singapore Math for a year and I’m not very impressed. Sorry if that disappoints anyone. I’m entitled to my own opinions.
There are two reasons we’re doing math through the summer for the first time this year. One is that due to busy-ness and lots of winter sicknesses my kids didn’t do as much math in the last year as I had planned. Second, the busy-ness during the school year due to outside classes, events, and extra-curricular activities makes doing all the home lessons difficult. I figured that if the kids did math this summer when we had a very light schedule of outside classes and camps and such that it would take off some pressure to do math every single day in the upcoming school year during September to June.
Anyhow today I was looked again at Teaching Textbook 5’s Scope and Sequence and decided that it seems right for my younger son to use right now even though he is 9 years old and just starting fourth grade. I was going to start it in September after having him do Singapore 3B over the summer as we’re doing math lessons when home and not traveling on summer vacations. But today my son begged me to start using Teaching Textbooks 5. When I told him he could, he was shouting with joy. (I am not making this up.) So today I’ll print off my older son’s records, uninstall the program then reinstall it so that my younger son can start in on the curriculum tomorrow. (At present the program can only be used by one student at a time so the only way to wipe off the old records and to use it with a new student is to uninstall it and then reinstall it.)
One last note is that homeschooling parents often say they tweak a curriculum’s use by tailoring it to the child to sometimes skip ahead if the work is too simple. I will confess that I have taken the opposite approach which I think has bored my kids and wasted their time. (
See related blog post here.) I always want to be thorough and I would worry about gaps especially where foundation-building topics like math are concerned. So when switching curriculum I have made my kids go further backwards in grade levels of math to have them re-learn and practice more concepts. This is why my son who was in sixth grade last year did Teaching Textbooks 5. Now he is officially starting grade seven but is starting Teaching Textbooks 6. Last week I blogged that I was surprised to see a lot of review in TT6 and since we are not taking the summer off there is none of the ‘forgetting over the summer’ happening.
I am proud to say that I am making myself get over this thoroughness and backtracking issue (
see related blog post here). I looked at TT5 and TT6 last night and figured that I can safely skip my son ahead to Chapter 4, Lesson 22 (of 116) as all the former lessons are review, going back to whole numbers, sequence of numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication and simple long division. Some of what is in future lessons is review but within that same lesson they go deeper or make the problems more complicated, so my son should find it all a breeze.
I anticipate that if my older son does math through the summer on days when we are home and if he does math at least three hours (three times) a week (if not four) from September-June he will finish TT6 mid-year and can move on to either TT7 (and skip the review in TT7 also) or he may do Pre-Algebra (grade 8 math).
One more thing I’ll mention is that as my older son receives therapies for his visual processing disorder (an eye tracking problem), which includes exercises to speed up the visual processing in his brain, his math speed and accuracy is improving. He is able to learn the math concepts faster and finds learning easier, he “gets it” faster. His memory is improving which helps when doing operations which have an order and multiple steps, like multiplication with double digits and with long division. He used to get fouled up with remembering which number to put where, what step was next, and other things that seemed so simple to me. Finding learning easy and being able to do work accurately and with less stress boosts his self-esteem and he is back to loving math. Hooray for not being afraid of math! Hooray for not just tolerating math but for loving it!
The very last thing I want to share is that sometimes a math curriculum can be just fine but some problem with a child happens and the child can associate negativity with that curriculum even though the real issue is something else. So sometimes a very good math program takes the fall as the scapegoat for blame as the cause of negative feelings. Sometimes switching to a new program can appeal to the child and if the unrelated issue is resolved the child may credit the success as being thanks to the new program when in fact it was a separate thing.
Looking back in hindsight, in my older son's case I feel he was struggling with math due to his undiagnosed, then later, his new diagnosis of a visual processing learning disorder. His issue was not with Math-U-See but was within his brain. Because we sought treatment and did syntonic phototherapy and later, vision exercises for vision therapy for visual processing issues, the problem seemed to start to resolve. So my son blames Math-U-See for his not "getting" the thing being taught, and I could blame myself as I administered it. My son credits Teaching Textbooks as the thing that helped him. I still hold
Math-U-See in high regard and recommend it to anyone who asks me for a recommendation. In our case I feel it is my son assigning wrong blame when in other cases it seems to me a homeschooling mother is assigning wrong blame on a certain curriculum. In my case with not liking Singapore Math, I think it is due to starting off with a different curriculum and switching mid-steam. I bet that people using Singapore Math from the beginning and moving along at the child's pace would not have the same issues with it as I did. Due to the switching mid-stream, my younger son has learned to hate Singapore Math, even though the issue may not be with their whole program but due to his switching from one company's scope and sequence to another's in grade three.
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