kriston: what geometry have you done so far? have you put this together or are you using a currciulum?
I'm using
Painless Geometry by Lynette Long. I have no idea if it's hated or well-respected or what; it's just a book I found on the library shelves among lots of other books when I was looking for geometry materials. I flipped through the armful of stuff that I found, and I liked this better than the other stuff. It seemed to fit where we are.
It is more experiment-based than the other materials I found, so DS7 can see that what the book is teaching is true. I like this problem-solving approach. It is real geometry, not the "this is a triangle" stuff that passes for grade-school geometry. It uses theorems and even proofs, but it doesn't get bogged down with them, as I remember geometry doing in my jr. high class. It's more gentle. (And BTW, I liked proofs, but I can't imagine asking a 7yo to slave away over them!) It moves at a fairly easy pace. It doesn't have much arithmetic or algebra (we're on page 95 of 300 or so), so I don't have to require that he memorize his times tables yet. If there is a workbook, I didn't get it, so it doesn't require that DS7 do workbook problems. That's a plus right now. It has challenge problems fairly regularly spaced through the chapters that stretch logic and make him really think about how the figures work, what the rules are.
I'm babbling a bit, but for a 7yo visual-spatial kid who is ripe for math but not loving arithmetic right now, it's been an astonishingly good fit.
And I'm with Erica: I like that we can jump around and follow our noses, weird though it may seem. I know we'll have some gaps as we go along, given that we're doing geometry before we do long division. (!) But we have plenty of time to spiral back around and fill the gaps in as we need to. I'm not worried about it. Heaven knows, DS7 is learning and loving to learn! What more can I ask for, really?
Does that answer your question, Dazey? I feel like I'm just rambling incoherently...
