Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School The year in math: a retrospective

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.