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AmyRobynne
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| Posted: July 03 2012 at 10:57pm | IP Logged
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I recently decided to begin homeschooling my rising 1st and 3rd graders beginning this fall. They used Saxon math at their previous school. I feel pretty good about putting my oldest in Saxon 5/4 this fall -- it's what he would have been doing anyway. Our whole family is a pile of math and science nerds and I think 5/4 will be a good fit for him. I've had both boys going over math facts using Xtramath online this summer. I also bought Miquon workbooks and Cuisenaire rods while doing a trial homeschooling week in mid-June.
I'm less sure what to do with my 6 year old. My husband expressed a preference that he continue with Saxon math 2 since he just finished Saxon 1. My husband doesn't have too many opinions on their curriculum, so I'm willing to go along with it. But I'd love opinions on how to implement it given the kid I'm working with.
Leo, my 6 year old, grasps math concepts really quickly. He understands what multiplication and division are about already. He's not strong with his math facts. I feel like once he gets the math facts down cold, we'll be able to fly through a lot of things. He freezes up when he sees a big page of problems because he doesn't like writing very much. I saw the Saxon worksheets come home last year and it's my understanding that the instructor does one side with the child and then they do the other side on their own.
Would it be reasonable for me to go over the one side, having him write his answers, and then have him orally tell me the answers for the second side? That would overcome the "I don't want to write it all" attitude but still give some number-writing practice.
I've been told that Saxon 2 has a lot of review from Saxon 1. What's a good way to decide where in the book we should start? Is there a way to do all the lessons, but at a faster pace until we find a point where he needs more practice?
Also, what about the meeting book? My kids talk about doing morning meeting with their teachers and I get the impression that they went over calendar/weather/etc. I think that's part of the Saxon program. Is that overkill with homeschool? Would that time be better spent doing read-alouds?
Help!
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SallyT
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| Posted: July 04 2012 at 12:36pm | IP Logged
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Yes, if writing is a problem, you could certainly do work orally. You might also have him write answers on a whiteboard, or work them out with rods or other manipulatives (we've leaned heavily on bags of black-eyed peas). For early writers, the small writing required by many workbook pages is just beyond them, and the idea of having to write a lot is very brain-freeze-inducing. Anything you can do to help him past that, so that he can concentrate on the actual math, will be invaluable.
Seems to me that if all the "meeting" part of Saxon at that level is about is calendar and weather, you could cover that in two minutes at the start of your day. So much of what math programs cover, outside foundational facts and concepts, is stuff that is naturally addressed in everyday life: telling time, reading a calendar, measurements, reading charts, graphs, etc. As long as you're attentive to those things as part of the rhythm of your life together, including your kids in activities like cooking and talking about these subjects, I don't think you have to worry about doing them formally, as a school lesson.
It also seems to me that devoting time and energy to those foundational facts -- having the basic knowledge at his fingertips so that he can apply concepts he already understands -- is a good and important thing. Everything else will go so much more quickly and smoothly if he's not having to stop and think what 7+8 is, for example (or 7x8 -- for some reason those 7s and 8s are about the hardest facts to remember!). My brother and cousin both work as math tutors, and my cousin, particularly, who works with elementary-aged children, has observed that the single greatest impediment to a child's being able to move forward successfully in math is mastery of basic facts, since they are the essential vocabulary of the larger language.
I know that Saxon devotees, especially at the higher levels (I have a child who's done Algebra 1/2 and Algebra 1 so far, having previously done MCP math through the first half of 6th grade) insist that really to learn the math, the child has to do every single problem -- that you can't just assign evens or odds or whatever. I haven't used or seen Saxon at the early-elementary level, so I don't know how it's set up, but in general, at that age, 20 minutes of math practice at a go is sufficient. If the number of problems on the page is overwhelming, or is going to take longer to do than 20 minutes, I would do odds or evens, or do half a page at a time, or whatever you need to do to make the practice manageable. You can also reinforce with math games (board games, online games, whatever appeals to you) to help him memorize his facts. My older son, when he was 5 or 6, memorized addition facts to 12 by playing Monopoly, for example.
And yes, you can work quickly with him through the first part of the book, though you may find that he needs the review more than you think, especially if his grasp of the facts is wobbly. My own experience, with kids who tend to get concepts but not facts (we do state-mandated testing, and my younger children consistently score well on the "concepts" part of the test, and significantly less well on "computation"), is that however tempting it is to want to skip ahead to the new and more interesting stuff, the review is there for a reason. My children, at least, *need* to go over the boring basics in one way or another, because it takes several passes through the same material for those basics really to become second nature for them, so that they can move forward to higher-level work.
Doing a morning meeting/Morning Basket time at home is a great way to begin your homeschooling day, and it can include things like calendar and weather. You might begin with prayers, then note the date on the calendar, maybe look at an analog clock (put one in your school space if you don't have one there already) to determine the time, discussing how you read the clock, take a look outside to discuss the weather, then begin your day's complement of read-alouds. If you like, you can include math read-alouds during this time as well -- I'm going to be reading my way through the Life of Fred elementary series with my rising 3rd and 4th graders this coming year, for example.
Then you can do your "table work," including regular math curriculum, giving your 1st grader your attention so that he can do his problems orally if needed (or some of them -- maybe do several rows orally, then let him write the answers for a row or two as a kind of little quiz. I wouldn't make him copy out the whole problem, if that's even asked for at this level, until writing becomes easier overall). You can even make math part of copywork -- once or twice a week, let him copy a simple addition or subtraction problem or two in a primary-ruled journal/copybook, to work on number formation and to reinforce a "fact of the day/week."
I hope this is helpful. I tend to stress out over math more than anything else -- we're a very verbal, literary/humanities kind of family, and all that world of learning comes to us as second nature, but math? My oldest (18) struggled all the way through school (we began homeschooling when she was 9), though she did well in her one required college math course; my second (14) has emerged as a very strong math and science student, mostly due to his own drive and desire and ability to teach himself; my third and fourth (9 and 8) are too young for me to say yet how things are going to turn out, though as I said, they seem to grasp concepts a lot more readily than they retain facts. I'm certainly coming from a place of planning to review and emphasize basic facts and operations in the coming year!
Godspeed you in your decisions and endeavors.
Sally
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AmyRobynne
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| Posted: July 04 2012 at 11:21pm | IP Logged
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Thank you so much for such a detailed response!
"For early writers, the small writing required by many workbook pages is just beyond them, and the idea of having to write a lot is very brain-freeze-inducing. Anything you can do to help him past that, so that he can concentrate on the actual math, will be invaluable."
Yes, this is definitely what I'm hoping to overcome. It's not the math holding him up, it's the writing. I'm sure it was worse when he had to to do worksheets as homework -- after a full day at school, writing was the last thing he wanted to deal with.
"It also seems to me that devoting time and energy to those foundational facts -- having the basic knowledge at his fingertips so that he can apply concepts he already understands -- is a good and important thing."
Until my husband said that he'd really like Leo to do Saxon 2 math, my primary alternative I was considering was to just play math games with him all year and learn all 4 operations' facts. It definitely seems like everything else at this age is easily picked up somewhere but the math facts shouldn't be glossed over. I'll definitely plan to incorporate games of that nature somewhere.
Saxon 1, 2, and 3 are set up differently than 5/4 and up. Problems are written on worksheets and don't need to be copied over. I heard that the original Saxon program began with 5/4 and someone else added K, 1, 2, and 3 to encourage people to use it the entire way, but Saxon himself thought memorization of math facts was all that was needed before 5/4.
"If you like, you can include math read-alouds during this time as well -- I'm going to be reading my way through the Life of Fred elementary series with my rising 3rd and 4th graders this coming year, for example. "
I've heard people mention Life of Fred but I finally checked it out and wow, it looks so amusing! Do you have your kids do the problems or just read it? I found someone selling the first book and hopefully I'll be able to get it because it just seemed like a fun way to look at things.
Thanks again for all the insight! I was a total math nerd (who am I kidding -- I will always be a math nerd) so I probably care more about getting math right than other subjects.
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SallyT
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| Posted: July 05 2012 at 1:08pm | IP Logged
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I haven't used Fred yet, though other people on this forum have -- if you do a search, you'll turn up some older discussions about it.
I'm the opposite of a math nerd -- we're total humanities nerds in our house, but I have one child (my 14-year-old) who's something of a math/science autodidact. He moved into Saxon Algebra 1/2 late in his 6th grade year, having done the highest-level MCP math workbook (E, I think?), which followed on a lot of fairly informally done math (skills workbooks, games, etc). He credits Saxon with inspiring his love for math -- not something you hear every day, I have to admit -- and in our state-mandated standardized testing he has achieved very high scores in math. I'm hoping my younger kids are going to bloom similarly, though I have to admit that I'm not as sanguine about this as I am about things like reading and writing.
I am stressing a bit over math with my younger set, who are 8 and 9, mostly because of test scores, though I take them with a very large grain of salt. It's *not* being a math nerd myself that makes me want to get it right -- I got it so wrong in my own education, and I don't want my children to have to repeat my experience in that area. What their test scores indicate is that they get concepts, but they struggle with basic computation -- and while math is about so much more, it's also about basic computation, which is the gateway to a lot of that so much more . . .
So I am trying to feed both sides of the brain here . . . We've used MEP math, which they and I really like, and I think that at the end of the day it's very, very good for learning to *think* mathematically, but I do worry about the computational stuff that the tests ask them to do, which they stress out about if they can't do because of the difference in scope and sequence . . . So, after nine years and counting of homeschooling, with one successful graduate under my belt, I'm still wandering in the math wilderness! (but I do know from boys and struggles with handwriting!)
Sally
PS: Here's one Life of Fred conversation, and here is another, with some ideas for combining it with another curriculum.
And just so you can share my total schizophrenia in this area, here's a recent post on MEP math and my struggles to decide whether to use it or not in the coming year.
All this to say, take my math advice for what it is worth, because that might not be that much!
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4Real Forums : Living and Loving Numbers
Topic: Math with my first grader
