I have always loved basic math, and began teaching addition and subtraction to my daughter (now 5) shortly after she turned 2. She loves it too, and we both like to challenge each other with math problems (her WRAT-4 scores place her in the mid 90th percentile for math computation).

My concern is whether the methods I'm teaching my daughter are going to create problems for her when she enters first grade, and starts getting more heavily into the common core way of doing things. Having learned the basics over the course of first & second grade the traditional way, I look at common core examples and find them ludicrous and incomprehensible. I'm saying this as someone who once considered math as a potential college major, but found that it became too weird and abstract once I got past multidimensional calculus. To my mind, it's almost as if they've taken all of the weird & abstract stuff, and brought it down to an elementary school level.

In any event, my understanding is that traditional addition, subtraction, multiplication & division are now postponed until fourth - sixth grades, while students learn the common core theory. I'll reserve judgment on whether this is a good or bad thing until I see how my daughter does with it.

My question in the meantime, is whether I'll be helping or harming my daughter if I continue to teach her math in the traditional way. I can see an argument being made that the methods I've taught her might just confuse her. On the other hand, it might be helpful to her to be able to calculate the answer to a question in advance, before having to deconstruct the problem using the CC methodology.

I would appreciate hearing any thoughts that others might have.

My son expressed an interest in math this year, so I bought him some workbooks to do on his own for fun. Whenever he wants to know how to do something new, I teach it to him. I doubt that this hurts him in second grade common core math. The pace of math is so slow at school. But I feel like if kids are curious about something, we might as well teach them. Besides, now DS8 knows how to log onto Kahn Academy and watch videos anyway!

No, I don't see how it could hurt her.

I would look into your school district specifically for what curriculum they use to teach common core standards, but it was not our experience with "new math" that multiplication and division were pushed off. In fact, I was surprised at the introduction of certain things at 1st and 2nd. They expected most kids wouldn't get those concepts at that age, but they introduced them anyhow.

It probably won't hurt her but it may hurt your relationship with her future teachers. As long as your traditional teaching isn't the rote algorithm method my teachers used it should be good long term though. Even with rote algorithms i ended up with good number sense but i bet most of my classmates didn't.

Thanks everyone. My wife and I actually had a parent-teacher conference this afternoon, and I was quire surprised when the teacher told us that math is the one area where our daughter struggles a bit. She told us that they gave our daughter 7 blue blocks and 3 pink blocks. Our daughter had no problem saying which pile had more blocks, but became confused when asked how many more blocks were in the bigger pile. When we got home, I asked our daughter how much 7 minus 3 equaled. She let out a huge sigh and said "too easy, 4".

The teacher also said that our daughter was also having some difficulty with something called number bonds, and showed us a sheet she had completed in class. A number bond seems to be a number in a box on top with 2 circles below, one of which also contains a number. The student is supposed to fill in the missing number, such that the numbers in the 2 circles equal the number in the box. I printed some out from an internet site and gave one to my daughter when we got home, and immediately saw the problem. She was adding the 2 numbers shown and putting the total in the empty circle. When I showed her how to do it properly, she had no problems at all, even when I added a third number into the bond.

All in all, I think the problem is with common core, and not with my daughter's math ability.

In any event, I asked the same question I posed above to my daughter's teacher, and she said to feel free to teach math to my daughter any way I see fit. The objective of common core, she said, is to teach kids multiple ways to get to the answer, so one more way should help. The teacher also added that she agrees with the CC objectives, but doesn't like the way it's been implemented.

Number bonds? Umm, okay. Decomposing numbers in kindergarten. Umm.

I did a lot of reading about the ideas behind Common Core math (stuff written by the people who wrote the standards), and my understanding about CC addition is that the whole point is that addition means combining things. IMO, "number bonds" don't really...do that. I suspect that they just create confusion and encourage kids to memorize an algorithm.

A huge part of the problem with the CC is that the standard authors just kind of figured that the textbook people would make Wonderful Books and that the teachers would rush out to learn about CC methods. Predictably, neither of these things has happened, and one of the 3 primary people who wrote the math standards has to tutor his daughter in math. I am not making this up.

At the same time, you might want to see if your daughter's confusion about the block problem was trivial or if she really didn't understand that she was being given a subtraction problem. She may understand what subtraction is algorithmically, yet still might not always recognize when she needs to use it. This is common, I think. A principal I know used to talk about typical curricula teaching kids to do an algorithm, but not how to recognize when it was needed.

Give her a similar problem. If she doesn't get it, you might want to do a few exercises with her, and maybe dream up a few more that ask her to apply an algorithm. Personally, when I'm teaching a lesson like this to my kids, I don't give them the answer. I try to get them to think their way through the problem, as moments like this are the ones that honestly challenge a gifted kid who can do straightforward worksheets in her sleep.

If she does get it or eventually figures it out, ask her how she got to the answer. This, IMO, is precisely when a student should be explaining an answer (as opposed to CC worksheets that want kids to explain every little algorithm).

I would not be so quick to dismiss this as a common core issue. It sounds like a teaching issue. There are two ways for teaching young kids to set up subtraction problem. Kids typically get the taking away something problems very easily. The comparison problem is harder for most kids. It sounds like your daughter was not familiar with the comparison set up and the teacher didn't get through to her.

As for number bounds and decomposition, that is exactly how Singapore Math teaches it, SM is hardly common core.

In CC math, this is the type of written response they are looking for from kindergarten students.

First, they should draw pictures of 7 blue squares and then 3 pink blocks, preferably right below the 7 blue squares, all nicely aligned.

Second, they should write a number bond that has 7 as whole and 3 and 4 as parts.

Third, they should write a number sentence. 7 - 3 = 4

Then, they need to explain their answer. It'd go something like: I needed to find the difference between the small and big piles so I subtracted 3 from 7.

IMO, it's a lot for 5/6 year olds but most of them get it and can do it, although the quality of written statements can vary quite a bit but they need to be taught, step-by-step and build up to this throughout the year.

So, I've tried to educate myself.
Read the link supplied by Val (thanks!) and am beginning to understand how common core standards came into being in the first place and are actually somewhat based in singapore maths, which I understand are actually the go-to curriculum for gifted homeschoolers (European parent here, so total outsider, remember?)
Googled a bit and found this to be instructive:
http://www.mes.weakleyschools.com/Singapore%20Math%20pages/L12-11_parent_letter.pdf
Sounds familiar - that's how my kid is being taught maths in elementary. Only they don't teach him by using Latin terminology (decomposing? Are kindergarten teachers really trying to teach kindergartners by telling them to "decompose"?), they teach him by providing sample problems so kids can figure out what they are supposed to do. I always felt that these 5000 different ways of showing that 4 and 3 is 7 would drive me nuts, but I suppose that is very much a gifted kids problem and most kids will really be helped by building number sense. So it is up to elementary teachers to use some common sense as well in how they, um, actually, teach, ie help both kids who struggle and gifted kids to understand what they are supposed to do, and then maybe not make gifted kids who get it do all 5000 ways but give them something more interesting after the first 300 or so...
It can't be that hard. They all have a BEd, right? What did THEY learn?!

I think we've discussed math anxiety in teachers before. Some articles of note:

http://stemwire.org/2013/05/31/math-anxiety-doesnt-just-affect-students/

PNAS article on teacher-transmitted math anxiety:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836676/

Abstract of Rachel McAnallen dissertation (in gifted ed) cited in first article, regarding teacher experiences with math and math anxiety:

http://gradworks.umi.com/34/64/3464333.html

Personally, I have no more of an issue with CC math than with many other frameworks, but I do think that it generally has been implemented poorly, especially at the level of teacher retraining. The teachers I know who like it and find success with it, anecdotally, have been those who are divergent thinkers themselves, and are not afraid to try new things, to fail, and to play with the curriculum. (Of course, one suspects these teachers would be effective with any curriculum!)

As someone who always asked 'why' and got the 'this is how we do it' response, I wish I'd been taught the why better, not just how. I appreciate that my kids have a strong number sense and can explain their maths. It's interesting to me, even their use of terminology that is beyond what I would have expected from kids so young, is cool to me. I never used baby talk with my kids, so why not teach terminology like decompose, number model, mental math, estimating, etc, from the get go, to take away the potential scariness of the big words before you get into abstract math? It might make math less intimidating later.

That said, it is how spiraling (which isn't CCSS specific) affects gifted kids that I struggle with, because my kids want to keep going to master it deeper, not stop and pick it up next year. So they might truly get it right away, beyond the instruction level, and then feel like they aren't learning anything new 1-2 years later when circling back. Whole to part, vs step by step.

The drawing can be frustrating -- DS has asked why he had to draw a picture to explain, and his teacher said it was to show his reasoning and that he's fluent enough to have more than one way to solve a problem. Sometimes that seems tedious, and yet, I find I do that myself when I'm trying to process something, and I've actually learned a few things that I didn't really get (or forgot) from my own education. It also is handy for figuring out where misunderstanding might be occurring.

To have that 'I never thought of it quite like that' moment is pretty cool. And there's this sense that the way you do it isn't wrong, you don't HAVE to do it like I do. It's not just memorizing the chart, pattern or algorithm; it's learning how to do calculations mentally and having a back up mental process for when your memory fails you on that quick answer. Rounding and estimating help you confirm your long work, in case you made a simple calculation error.

I think they're good habits to form, if you can allow for those who show mastery initially to do something beyond the class, rather than forcing too much repetition. The CCSS, from my observation, have given a framework for teachers to differentiate at least a grade above -- they can look at the next year's rubric in that standard and work toward that level of mastery with the top cluster in class.

My understanding is that CCSS Math doesn't spiral unlike the math program they were using previously. At least for my state. It used to be that 4th & 5th grade math were nearly identical, just 5th grade math went deeper. Making it easy for the 'gifted' or high performing math students to skip 4th grade math. While with Common Core they need to implement "compression" instead.

That said.. since Common Core is a set of STANDARDS. Not all states/school districts teach it the same way.

I think that this is the essential problem with the Common Core. The list of standards is only a start, with the most important step being making curricular materials. Every single standard is open to a wide interpretation, and given that textbook authors are underpaid and on tight deadlines, it was completely predictable that things wouldn't work out as planned. So the very laudable teach them that addition means combining things has turned into decomposing numbers and number bonds. It's a farce.

I've done a lot of grant application review in the education field. People who propose a new way of teaching something without providing concrete examples AND samples of their curriculum tend to get heavy criticism. In the end, the most important thing is the product, not the idea.

The CC authors failed by not producing textbooks. Worse, I can't even find a small set of examples for each math standard (maybe I've missed them?). How hard would that have been, to at least give Pearson a starting point? Maybe they saw that as too much or not their job or whatever, but the result is that we end up with a bad stew that looks like Everyday Math on LSD.

I was initially in favor of Common Core math, and now I'm dubious. The K-5 standards are okay (though 6-8 are not, IMO), but that fact was always irrelevant because the plan was always to drop the ball as soon as the game got going.

A lot of the problem people associated the Common Core math is the problem of the reform math. Unlike Val, I am quite okay with decomposing numbers and number bonds. That is how I do mental math and it feels natural to me. The reform math comes in when the kids are required to draw everything, explain everything and that is really annoying. The bad text books and bad test questions exacerbate the issue.

I always find it interesting that American teachers found Singapore Math hard to teach. I happen to love it.

Wrt SG Maths - what is there to teach? Most kids I know that did it just followed the books and basically taught themselves by following the examples in the book.

The problem is that it’s important to see a concept through the eyes of someone who’s never met it before. Not doing this, I think, is a stumbling block in a lot of American math education programs. Number bonds is a good example. It’s abstract, and abstraction doesn’t mix well with 6-year-olds. The concept needs to be as obvious as possible, and this just isn’t the case with number bonds. That they work for a gifted adult as an algorithm isn’t honestly relevant to teaching a concept to a little kid.

It’s much easier to have the teacher put 3 blocks on her right and two on her left. “Okay kids, how many blocks here (pointing)?” “THREE!” How many here? “TWO!”

“Now I put them together. How many blocks?”

“FIVE!”

“See? I combined 3 and 2 and got 5. Addition means combining things.”

What do number bonds offer that this simple demonstration doesn’t? IMO, bonds are unnecessary and may turn a simple idea into something confusing. Why use an abstract concept on six-year-olds when a simple concrete one will do the job better?

Decomposing numbers has the same basic problem. The idea is obvious to an intelligent adult, but that doesn’t make it so for a kindergartner. Again, it’s too abstract. Think about little kids who tear a piece cheese into several pieces and tell you that they have more cheese now. They decomposed the cheese, but didn’t see that they still have the same amount of cheese, because the idea is too abstract for them.

What you described is the first step of introducing addition. Number bond basically is just how many different addition problems give you the same answer. Decomposition is the natural extension of that. Very naturally these skills lead to adding numbers great than 10. My first grader never had a problem doing any of these. Maybe the words are big, but the concept is not tripping up the kids. It might be tripping up the parents who grew up in a different environment, but the kids don't have any issues with this concept if this is how they are taught.

It is an astonishingly good curriculum/text book, isn't it?

That's not what I've seen. But either way, why add a layer of complication to simple process?

Extend the demonstration and move a block from the group of two to the other group. Now you have four on one side and on the other, yet when you combine them, there are still 5 blocks. "See? There are different ways of making a group of five." Next: hand out blocks ask the kids how many ways they can combine things to get a group of 4 or 6 or 7 or whatever. Bonus: see who can put all their blocks on one side and none on the other.

This idea, once ingrained, can be extended naturally and logically to writing out sets of sums that equal a single number. It can also extend to the commutative property without using that term explicitly (e.g. four blocks on the left vs. four blocks on the right).

Again, why use abstraction when concrete will do? Kids need a solid foundation in concrete ideas and basic operations before they can move to the abstract and truly understand topics like algebra.

As for decomposition being a natural extension, it starts in Kindergarten. There's nothing to extend from when you're at square one. Plus, kindergarten is an age when kids think they have more cheese when they tear the cheese into pieces.


Okay, that's a bit insulting, and there's no need for that. That said, this accusation has been used frequently by people defending poorly thought-out math programs: you just don't understand it. Yes, I understand it. The engineers complaining about Everyday Math understood it, too. Etc. I also understand that in teaching concepts of basic arithmetic, simplicity wins over abstraction.

What you described is exactly how number bond is taught in Singapore math. From concrete to pictures and to abstract. Maybe you just don't like the name/jargon, but kids need some definition as a short hand at some point, right? I don't see how what you described is any different than the number bond teaching is in Singapore math. Once the kids figured out all the number bonds up to 10, they can easily decompose a number to make 10s for hard addition and subtraction problems.

Sorry if I offended you, I did not mean to be insulting anyone. I do hear parents complain about this method. I am just trying to point out this is really not that different than what you are doing. Also I am not sure whether Everyday math uses number bond. Singapore Math does. This happens to be what I like about the current math education. I can do away with the explaining the answers in words part.

Perhaps the piece missing is that, in SM, almost all kindergarten math (and a fair amount of first grade math) is done with manipulatives and practical math stories (word problems). The description of this particular CC implementation appears to be lacking sufficient concrete practice, prior to the paper and pencil pictorial work.

SM spends two years teaching number bonds, with the term and visual introduced in K, but mainly in conjunction with manipulatives. It's only in first, after plenty of opportunities for establishing number sense with concrete practice, that the symbolic representation of number bonds is used more in a paper and pencil context.

And yes, kindergarten is the developmental range when most children are just beginning to develop conservation, so even the manipulative play may be beyond them--though it may also help them to explore conservation.

You're correct that I'm complaining about how it's explained (specific to the CC). The number bond approach seems to be used by the Common Core as a means to teaching a concept (existence of equivalent sums), rather than as an algorithm for displaying these sums, which is what it is. That's the problem.

US math education has a way of making straightforward topics unnecessarily complex. Ideas are presented out of order, concepts are mashed up together, and individual algorithms are treated as critical routes to understanding, rather than as techniques for getting an answer.

The thing is, it all looks pretty at first glance. The textbooks are colorful and friendly and have lots of nice photographs in them. If you're familiar with something from another system, you might look at one and think, "Oh, they use x [e.g. number bonds], like SM does. Great." But when you look closely, you see that they present things out of context, mix too many ideas in one go, and make such a mess, even HG+ kids feel like they can't understand math concepts that they figured out for themselves when they were 3 or 4, and start to hate it.

I'm going to compare a SM presentation of number bonds with that in a CC book. I strongly suspect that the SM book will present ideas one step at a time in a logical manner. I doubt the same will be true of the CC book. I say this because I've done this several (umpteen?) times already over the years and the result is always the same: Common Core or not, mass-use books produced by Big Ed make a mess of things.

Yes, exactly. Thank you aeh.

Yes - DD started it as a 'fun' thing to do and didn't even realize it was "Maths" for a while there. It really does the job very nicely.

I realize this may be an insanely stupid question, but help me out here, I want to be less stupid: why do US elementary schools not just use the Singapore text books? Or, if using a foreign textbook is unpalatable, why has no publisher bought the rights and adapted the books for the US market?

Tigerle,

They do have Americanized/adapted SM materials. They even have a CC edition:

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_CC_Ed_s/252.htm
http://www.singaporemath.com/v/sf_pmcct3a.pdf

Looking at the sample pages, I have no issues with them.

ETA: I'd guess that the reason as to why these books aren't used more frequently in the classroom has a lot to do with the marketing (and perhaps lobbying) power of the big US publishing company.

Thank you mana, the political angle is really interesting.

So, the problem is not the cc standards, those are fine.
It's not that there isn't a good curriculum in existence that is aligned to those standards, there is one that is "astonishingly good".
It's not that there aren't any good textbooks available for the curriculum published in the US either, there are, and from how often I have read about home schoolers using those, they must have been around for some time.
It's not that math anxious elementary teachers can mess up the implementation, because kids can simply teach themselves following the examples in the book.

It's just that schools don't use them, possibly because of the influence or lobbying power of other textbook companies.

Who decides what curriculum/books to use? Local school boards? Do state departments of education get no say? I understand there is no federal authority. Who approves text books, is there an accreditation authority?

Actually, there is a major USA textbook publisher backing a version of SM. HMH publishes Math in Focus, which hews pretty closely to the SM method. I know several private schools, and at least two public schools, which use it. There is a network of math education professors, based in Massachusetts, who publish research and conduct trainings on it, and promote its use (both the Marshall Cavendish and HMH published versions). Both the MC and HMH versions are on the approved curriculum list for California, which pretty much makes them approved everywhere.

So there are no regulatory obstacles to schools using SM.

As I said before, some teachers find it hard to teach. Our district did a trial in four schools years ago, only one school did not have a fall in scores. Hard to believe, but it is true. So they abandoned it quickly.

In the end, our district wrote their own curriculum that borrows heavily from SM, but lacks the clarity and elegance, and adds all the reform math nonsense.

Our little private uses Go Math, which is like a poor man's version of the SM. A lot bigger, many fewer challenging word problems, but with more teacher's support. I have often wondered why they didn't simply adopt SM. I think it does go back to the fact teachers who are not strong in math find it hard,even if the gifted children and mathy adults love them.

That reminds me, I think what happened in Seattle was rather interesting:

http://kuow.org/post/surprise-move-seattle-schools-approve-singapore-math

http://www.kplu.org/post/seattle-sc...ce-new-math-textbooks-makes-its-own-pick

Some interesting comments at the end of the 2nd link.

I haven't seen either of the program but MiF seems rather expensive. I can see why cost was a concern.

This discussion has been very helpful to me, even if it has veered away a bit from my original question. I had been aware that there was a great deal of controversy surrounding CC, but had never really investigated it before now (by the way, someone might want to tell the Weakley Schools that their first example of SM concepts has an incorrect total).

Not to turn this into a political discussion, but CC seems like a prime example of government overreach to me. One need only to look at the lack of basic math skills in a typical high school student working at a local supermarket, to see that there is a problem even in supposedly good school systems. To think that 3 university professors with no practical experience teaching young people could create a set of standards that will solve all of our problems nationwide though, seems particularly ridiculous to me.

Going back to my original question, it looks like my daughter may just have been confused by being given problems in an unfamiliar format with little or no explanation. She could have easily solved the underlying math problems at the age of two, and had no issues whatsoever once I explained that these were simple addition and subtraction problems. This experience does tend to reinforce aeh’s point about math anxiety in elementary school teachers.

As my daughter doesn’t really like to talk about her day at school and parent-teacher conferences are only scheduled twice a year, I guess I should start supplementing math in some methodical way, rather than through my haphazard method of making up games and teaching her the way I learned math. This raises a number of questions though:

- Is SM the best method for a girl approaching the end of Kindergarten? I had originally been thinking of the CTY (when it reopens) or the Stanford online programs, but SM seems to have a proven track record and is much cheaper.

- Is using SM, would books or digital be a better way to go? My gut instinct says books, but maybe a digital approach would be more fun and less like additional school lessons. If using books, would the U.S. Standards or CC edition be best for supplementation?

- Finally (and perhaps most importantly), should I supplement at my daughter’s intellectual level, or follow along at the pace of her classroom lessons? I gave my daughter the SM placement tests and she breezed through 1A and over half of 1B before she started to run into problems. In addition, her teacher said she’s reading and writing at an end-of-first grade level. At the moment my daughter seems quite happy at school, and isn’t ready socially to skip a grade, so I’m a bit hesitant to do anything that would increase the odds of her becoming bored in class.

Thanks for your help.

If you are concerned about being advanced causing boredom, I think it might be too late to prevent her from becoming bored in class in math, so I don't think I would prioritize this as a reason to hold her math development back. Though clearly, if she is happy at school, she is still getting something from the experience, even if it isn't math.

With children at a comparable stage, I have used SM books, basing placement on performance on the SM placement tests. (If you encounter terminology that she hasn't seen before, that is easily remedied by teaching her the SM terms, and moving on with the concepts.) I think little ones still prefer hands-on to online. But that would depend on your child. As to US Standards vs CC, I've used Standards, and liked it, but I don't think using CC would be terrible, either. I will note that the problem sets and review questions in Standards (and the older US edition) are very carefully designed to continue reinforcing and reviewing topics from much earlier, even when they are not among the ostensible review topics for that set, so there is something to be said for maintaining the sequence established in the Standards edition.

Another thought, for a young child: unless your DC particularly loves workbooks (and I've had those who did, and those who didn't), I would suggest purchasing only the textbooks, and working most problems orally, or on separate paper. There are plenty of practice problems in the textbook, so you don't really need both. The textbook is in color, which young children often enjoy, and includes the explanations of SM instruction, which the workbooks do not. If you happen to have learned most of your elementary math in a SM-similar way, you might be able to figure out the methods just from the way the workbook problems are laid out. If you haven't, then the textbooks will be very helpful.

It depends. I used SM with one of my kids who had suffered under dreadful math instruction. It was so bad, his skills regressed during the first semester of that year. SM, with its logical progression, got him on track and helped him a lot. That's a huge strength of SM.

Beast Academy from AoPS is also a very good and offbeat program. The comics and the friendly monsters make it appealing to kids. It also tends to explore a subject in more depth than other programs (including SM). The downside is that it's geared toward grade 2 and up (with books set to grade 3), but if your daughter's skills are near the end of grade 1, she'd likely benefit from it a year or so.

TBH, I've been teaching my kids since they were very little, and my approach has always been to use a combination of materials. No single source will provide everything you want, but it's not terribly difficult to cobble it all together from different sources. You can even create stuff yourself --- even if a self-made material is just an example or two that you think is missing from everything else you have. Because your daughter is so bright, you can also go way outside the curriculum, such as by showing her how to count in other number systems (e.g. hieroglyphics, which used base 10). If she can only read numbers in the hundreds now, just teach her how to count in hieroglyphics up to 999. Then add powers of ten as she's ready. This kind of stuff can be a lot of fun for kids. You can also do Roman numerals to whatever she's ready for. Contrasting both could lead to a discussion about how awkward it must have been for Romans to do arithmetic (how DID they multiply LXVIII times XXIV, anyway?? Even adding those numbers would have been a pain!) In contrast, arithmetic was far more straightforward for the Egyptians, even without a zero (which is another great topic for slightly older kids).


Personally, I stick with books, and we didn't use the CC edition of SM. SM works well already, so why use an edition geared to a program (well, a non-program) that has problems?


IMO, this is more of a philosophical question. Here are some observations I've made with my kids (ages 11 to 16).

*Moving ahead of an age-grade curriculum allows the child to have work that's appropriate to her level, and will require her to struggle for understanding from time to time (with my kids, this is what I like to see).

*Yes, she'll be ahead, and that's hard to deal with in many ways. The question to answer is: Which option do you like less: being ahead and the awkwardness that goes with it, or being bored/consistently underchallenged?

*IMO, HG+ kids will be bored in math and LA-type classes anyway, unless they're at a school that's been tailored to HG+ kids (see next point).

*Some schools may let the child work with you at home and do your assignments in math class. All my kids have benefited from this approach.

*I strongly recommend working in a methodical way. Given your comments about her classroom environment, do you think that your daughter will get a solid grounding in mathematics at her school? If not, you're probably the best person to provide it.

I am currently advocating for my DS7 for more challenged math curriculum. The school is not currently providing enough challenge. So I supplement at home using Beast Academy. My concern is more on him not getting challenged. He's already showing signs that he doesn't like anything challenging because "everything should be easy". I want him to struggle sometimes so he understands that no matter how smart he is, there are still things that require efforts and hard work.

Thanks everyone for your help. After a bit of back and forth with the SM Curriculum Advisor, I've ordered the 1B Standards material for my daughter along with some Manipulatives. It will also be a good chance for me to learn more about how math is taught nowadays as well. I still can't quite give up on the way I learned math though, so I also ordered some old fashioned flashcards.

Helping. And homeschooling is the way to go in this situation, common core is a rotten apple.