Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Lost it with "Everyday Math" Book

LOL, that is so annoying. And you gotta love the pictures too, you have to show your work. What is sad to me too is your DS's work seems actually more challenging than my DS's first grade assignments about what number comes next, and they are all numbers under 20. What number comes next in first grade?Really?

Can I just add my "ugh" to the chorus?

That curriculum is beyond ridiculous.

I'd better stop with that before I roll on for three pages.

UGH.

Well that's actually the 2nd grade work... his teacher is giving him 2nd grade homework, but he still has to do the 1st grade work in class. But according to his achievement testing, as well as his "grade level exam" he should be about halfway through 3rd grade.

She's ensuring there are no gaps. Because adding 2+2 is somehow likely to have a gap, even when you can add 3596+4989. I've given up temporarily because he's receiving full differentiation for reading... got to pick my battles!

Let us know how this goes. Our 3rd grader has to keep her EM book at home this year. I almost, almost had her finish the entire book last week and take it in. I've been keeping it out hoping she will just do it herself one day, but instead she chooses to do algebra.

Wow...that's scary that 2nd grade work is that simple as well. I don't know what level DS5 is at with math...maybe they will finish assessing him at some point. I would guess some things he is 3rd and some things 5th or above. It really depends. tonight's EM homework was "start a one and see how high you can count" My DS looks at me and says "I could count into the millions...I don't want to do that." so then he just wrote down 60 on the line, LOL. They also had to fill in missing numbers in the number grid from 1-10. I know that is first grade work...but I thought kids were supposed to all have differentiation. It's just frustrating. Mine does have differentiation for spelling...not so sure about reading. He told me that he met with the reading lady and that he was "done with reading" and that he doesn't need to see her for anything any more because he got the highest scores possible on her test. Hopefully they will do something for that.

Ahh...Everyday Math. It was the bane of DS9's existence when he was in 2nd grade. He wanted to do fractions and algebra, EM wanted him to cut out pictures of triangles and write about our past presidents. I have memories of writing "This is not mathematics!" on his homework sheets.

Sometimes on the way home from school, we'd get on the topic of EM and he'd exclaim, "What's the deal with this number grid* ?!? Why can't we just ADD????!!!?? It's so much easier!!"

Val

*The thing where they write 1-100 in a calendar-like format. This is supposed to teach number sense or something. They omitted zero and put each new ten on an old line:


11 ...18 19 20
21

I thought this was particularly confusing. Kids learned "number sense" by moving their fingers along the grid. I wrote a letter to the school's Curriculum-Meister pointing out the many flaws in this approach and how it could be mucho confusing. She told me that she had a hard time understanding what I wrote, but that EM was a good system and they were keeping it. Oh well.

DS had an EM homework sheet yesterday (3rd grade) which had a box labeled "Total" with two smaller boxes under it labeled "Part" and "Part". There was a word problem in which he needed to add 35 and 20. He had filled in the boxes correctly but wasn't sure what to write on the line below which asked, "Why does your answer make sense?"

Finally, he wrote, "Because I added perfectly."

That answer is perfect. Love it!!

Val

I am glad I am not the only one who thinks EM is retarded. It really is garbage.

At the risk of offending (which is not my intention), I would like to make a gentle suggestion that we use a word other than "retarded". This has come up in more than one post now and while I'm sure that no one here is intending to denigrate people with disabilities, calling something retarded implicitly carries the idea that people with cognitive disabilities are somehow..."less". Although I realize that it has not been used here in that way, it is a word that is still closely associated with its original meaning.

On a more topical note, while I'm neither a fan of EM nor of the lattice method, partial products is nothing more than a paper representation of steps many people take when they solve multiplication problems mentally. I would argue that it not only simplifies many multiplication problems, but also validates the way in which many strong math students flexibly use number understanding to solve those problems.