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    Joined: Jun 2012
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    I thought I'd write down my experiences this year with my 2nd grade son. Hopefully its of some use to others.

    We started the year with a switch to a new school which was entirely G&T. In talking with the principal I was hopeful that they might differentiate more or customize math a bit and at least they were moving from Every Day Math to MyMath for their texts. Sadly in practice this turned out to be a wash. A. was already walking to 3rd grade math last year and mostly repeating material and this year while the entire grade did the 4th grade curriculum he still was just mainly repeating. Most annoying was that they pretested for the entire year's worth of math and then more or less did nothing with the data except set up a section of "advanced" students. This section followed the same textbook and curriculum and really didn't differentiate much. I spent one afternoon asking the teacher for more challenge problems at least with not much changes.

    On the other hand, there was one fantastic part about the school. Unlike last year, when his bus was an hour earlier than my other child, this year he was a half hour later. I decided to take matters into my hands and do a 10-15 minute enrichment while we were waiting for the bus and thus was born "Morning Math". For the first few months I had him work on Khan Academy. The badge system turned out to be fairly motivating and he really like looking at the progress graphs and twiddling the data. After a few days I decided the suggested topics however were not systematic (often actually a bit random) and didn't build well on each other so I started curating them to more logically progress through decimals, percents and fractions. We never really used the videos, I'd explain new topics and let him finish the drills and the mastery quizzes usually about 5 problems. For basic skills that aren't too advanced I thought the problem sets were not too bad.

    We ended up doing two digressions. During a week of broken internet service, I took out some graph paper and we played around with graphing various linear and polynomial equations. That was pretty fun and hopefully gave him a taste of how they work. And then based on a recommendation we downloaded Dragon Box and he worked his way about 3/4's through it.

    Then around December I had a conversation with a math tutor while evaluating the district's sample new math textbooks. She was very keen on Singapore Math and I was a bit worried whether the problems on Khan Academy were sufficient and covered all the material or left some holes. I'd never tried using an actual textbook at home before but what the heck so I ordered the 5A and 5B textbooks and workbooks to try them out.

    We then commenced our 8 week sprint through them. What I found was that the textbooks had enough problems that the workbook was superfluous. I let him skip ahead if demonstrated enough mastery on any section to my satisfaction. There definitely were some more interesting problems sprinkled in there. I'm not sure if the bar char problems were meant to be solved as systems of linear equations but I chose to teach them that way. Overall I'd say it definitely felt more comprehensive and gave me more confidence that he had truly mastered the prev. material.

    So bolstered by this experience I went out and ordered the Art Of Problem Solving Pre-Algebra textbook. I'd seen this one before and it pretty much matches exactly how I'd like to teach the subject. There's a lot of formalism, proofs and exploratory problems that build on each other. Again I wasn't sure how A. would take the step up from mostly computation to the beginning of what I think of as math. And in the beginning I wasn't certain that he was ready yet. We went a lot slower since the material was both new and much more rigorous (bear in mind we were still limited to 20 minutes max pre-bus) and in the first chapter he complained about not wanting to do the challenge problems and seemed goofier. But he really liked the 24 game puzzles at the beginning of the chapters and seemed to adjust over the next few months. By the end of the year we worked through the first 3 chapters and he seemed to have become more excited about the work. I told him that I wanted to stop for the summer at the end of a chapter rather than in the middle and he independently asked why don't we just keep going?

    Overall, some chapters like exponents didn't have enough practice for him to master the concepts without me adding back some drills about the various properties and we had a circle back moment about the distributive property which I had thought he fully understood but as it turned out needed some more examples for conceptualization. On the other hand by the end he was making the break-throughs necessary to do most of the starred problems without prompting.

    My favorite moment of the year was recreating the famous 7 year old Gauss anecdote. One day, while actually at the bus stop, I asked if he could add the first 100 numbers in his head without paper and without any other hints and he thought for a few seconds and then just answered 5050.

    In sum, he made alot of progress and I had a lot of fun along the way. At some point I'm going to have to make peace with the official school mathematics track but for now its June and summer beckons.





    Last edited by Ben leis; 06/17/14 12:41 PM.
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    Wow, you really made the best out of this situation using the minimal time you have available in the morning. It's very inspiring. My kids are usually tired after school and have homework, play dates and extracurricular activities which take up most of their time after school. A few minutes before school each day may be the best approach for us too, it will ensure that we have a set time everyday to do a few minutes of the type of math that will engage them. I will try it in the fall, thanks for sharing.

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    Thanks for sharing what worked for you. Interesting to read and think about- a potential alternative to afterschooling.

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    what a great way to fit it in! smile It really sounds like you helped him have a great year with maths this year. How exciting!


    Mom to 3 gorgeous boys: Aiden (8), Nathan (7) and Dylan (4)
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    That's a great use of those snippets of time. I have to say, that wouldn't work for us. We home/virtual school, and what works for us is to focus on a single subject on any given day, and get through a few weeks curriculum in that one subject in one sitting. We find that is highly efficient time-wise.

    It sounds like your school is not coming to grips with how much acceleration some kids need. His true level may have permanently "lifted off" from what the school is willing to offer, so the real learning will happen at home.

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    Interesting - learning styles can definitely vary among kids. For us even given infinite time I would probably not have stretched much longer on many days. I found too much truly new material at once could be overwhelming and I started to worry about mastery and retention. Also my son's focus and drive only last so long and I'm concerned that things stay fun so he keeps going long term. So I'll tend to err on the side of stopping a little early. Although I'm totally with you on the sections where he was reviewing it was very satisfying to plow through a huge section quickly.

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    We were using an online curriculum (k12.com that our free virtual school uses) that is designed for average students, so the content is quite dilute. There's just not that much "new material" in a few weeks worth of that curriculum.

    You do have a point that when it does get to a lot of new material, as courses get higher, and using a tougher course like AoPS, then there won't be so much plowing through huge sections quickly.

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    22B, we used the same technique-- that worked pretty well up through trigonometry and algebra II material, frankly.

    In stats, though, the material was finally challenging enough conceptually that my DD needed regular reinforcement to retain things well. Unfortunately, we probably should have had her there at 10-11yo instead of 14, since she had a lot of years to think that mathematics was a matter of just knowing, intuiting, and/or needing no practice to master. I'm a little concerned about that attitude heading into college.



    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    Quote
    Unfortunately, we probably should have had her there at 10-11yo instead of 14, since she had a lot of years to think that mathematics was a matter of just knowing, intuiting, and/or needing no practice to master. I'm a little concerned about that attitude heading into college

    This is why DW and I have DD9 doing the AoPS Pre-Algebra now as we do not want her to fall into the rut of thinking that Maths is supposed to be a facile pursuit. Some of the questions definitely give her cause to think.

    She hasn't given up on any but she has needed a couple of attempts to get some of the challenge questions right. Going from SG Maths 5A and 5B to this took a good couple of weeks of hand holding at the start because it really drills in and gets into the nitty gritty instead of lightly skimming the surface causing nary a ripple.


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    This is also why we've moved math along until test scores dropped to about 80-90%--high enough to be confident of mastery, low enough to feel some mind stretching.


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