Math is not for the faint of heart
I despise math. There I said it, the homeschooling mom hates math. I think so much of my math hatred goes back to elementary school. We were not taught the why's of math, or what anything meant. We were just taught to memorize. I memorized how to divide, multiplication tables, measurements etc... So have all the info stored LOL, but I never understood why we did what we did with numbers. My wonderful mother sat with me for hours up on hours helping me with math. She was and still is, brilliant with math. She got me through high school math with decent grades.
I was not surprised when my Bryce started having trouble with math in 3rd grade. We muddled though by switching around curriculum, and using grandma as a tutor. He's 14 now, and has zero math trouble, which is wonderful!
Now Marlie, wonderful sweet Marlie does not have a math mind. She's even more of an artistic left brained kid than Bryce was. She had trouble with math from the first day of Kindergartn. She's 9 now, and has always had trouble with math. At the beginning of this school year she still couldn't add and subtract fluently. We've used most major math curriculums with zero success, Making Math Meaningful, Saxon, Abeka, Bob Jones, Horizons etc...
I switched her to Singapore Math out of sheer desperation in October. We had just had her tested by the math specialist at our homeschool program. The results were mixed. She was able to do most of the work, but she didn't seem to understand it. It also took her much longer than it should of to answer the questions, and she ended up in tears by the end of the test. The math specialist suggested Singapore Primary Mathematics. I reluctantly purchased another math curriculum. My plan was to give it a few weeks, and if there was no change, we had lined up a educational specialist to work with her.
To my absolute shock and amazement, with the first lesson everything changed. She seemed to completely understand what she was supposed to be doing. She laughed when I handed her a bunch of straws to help her understand place value, but then was intrigued by the pictures of bundles of straws in her textbook. Singapore math gives the student frequent opportunities to move from concrete manipulation to pictorial representation to abstract calculation. I think Marlie needed to move through that cycle over and over again, which Singapore does.
This week she learned how to multiply and divide numbers by 2. I've been dreading multiplication for the past few years. I knew she would have trouble with the concept, but with Singapore, she's zooming through the workbook, begging me to do more pages. She totally understands the concepts. It's not just memorized, like my knowledge was at her age, but completely sunk in, understanding. I'm not worried at all about her math skills, she's moving right along now, YAY Singapore Math!!
I was not surprised when my Bryce started having trouble with math in 3rd grade. We muddled though by switching around curriculum, and using grandma as a tutor. He's 14 now, and has zero math trouble, which is wonderful!
Now Marlie, wonderful sweet Marlie does not have a math mind. She's even more of an artistic left brained kid than Bryce was. She had trouble with math from the first day of Kindergartn. She's 9 now, and has always had trouble with math. At the beginning of this school year she still couldn't add and subtract fluently. We've used most major math curriculums with zero success, Making Math Meaningful, Saxon, Abeka, Bob Jones, Horizons etc...
I switched her to Singapore Math out of sheer desperation in October. We had just had her tested by the math specialist at our homeschool program. The results were mixed. She was able to do most of the work, but she didn't seem to understand it. It also took her much longer than it should of to answer the questions, and she ended up in tears by the end of the test. The math specialist suggested Singapore Primary Mathematics. I reluctantly purchased another math curriculum. My plan was to give it a few weeks, and if there was no change, we had lined up a educational specialist to work with her.
To my absolute shock and amazement, with the first lesson everything changed. She seemed to completely understand what she was supposed to be doing. She laughed when I handed her a bunch of straws to help her understand place value, but then was intrigued by the pictures of bundles of straws in her textbook. Singapore math gives the student frequent opportunities to move from concrete manipulation to pictorial representation to abstract calculation. I think Marlie needed to move through that cycle over and over again, which Singapore does.
This week she learned how to multiply and divide numbers by 2. I've been dreading multiplication for the past few years. I knew she would have trouble with the concept, but with Singapore, she's zooming through the workbook, begging me to do more pages. She totally understands the concepts. It's not just memorized, like my knowledge was at her age, but completely sunk in, understanding. I'm not worried at all about her math skills, she's moving right along now, YAY Singapore Math!!
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