Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Anyone use Mathnasium, or similar?

Our 3-year-old son loves loves loves loves numbers and math. I wondered if he would like taking some sort of math enrichment class/experience. Do places like Mathnasium or Kumon work well with young gifted children? Or are they more for kids that need catching-up? Any experience?

Thanks!

Not sure for 3 year olds, but our DD8 absolutely loves IMACS.
I think they have programs for younger kids but are only available
"live" in the Southeast, and of course everywhere online.
The program uses interactive games to teach math and logic
in a very engaging way that is fun for the kids, and they can
earn points to buy rewards (most significantly for DD, candy!)
So it is not the rote repetitive kind of thing that some kids would
just not put up with. We have had a hard time getting DD's
school to provide acceleration and so were very glad that a friend
told us about IMACS--I had not heard about it before that.
Good luck finding something that works for you!

Mathnasium is good- but requires the child to be able to work independently- generally starts at 2nd grade and the occasional 1st grader. They took my son at 1st because he was ahead. So I know ours would probably not take a 3 year old but they will take your kid as far as they want to go!

I have not tried Kumon, but I have heard it is highly repetitive. If I am wrong, please correct me.

My kids get bored quickly from repetitive tasks, and I suspect that is true of most of our children. At age 3 my kids were being shown the basics of addition and subtraction on paper, and after they understood it, they did the problems mostly mentally in their head to the best of their ability. We went back to paper only for new material.

You can try the computer program IXL. My little one loved it although I personally got bored by it. Kumon is soooo repetitious. We have done one page a day, which is more than enough. I think a small amount of repetition is good but more than that is mind-numbing.
Three is very young- probably just showing him simple addition, subtraction, multiplication with blocks is really all you need.

Kumon has Junior Kumon which may be good for your kiddo. But when your kiddo starts getting to 2nd grade level, I would recommend something else like Khan Academy, IXL or even study island or ten marks.

Kumon has a lot of gaps when you compare with the school curriculum (2nd grade onwards) and a lot of repetition will bore your kiddo.

But as Jack's mom said, you can buy and use flashcards for addition and subtraction and work sheets from internet. It will be a lot cheaper than >$100/month fee at Kumon.

Unless your child is begging for worksheets, just make it play. At 3, DS was playing yahtzee, and other games that use adding dice, plus checkers, blocks (including Cuisinaire rods), connect 4, etc. He'd count things a fair amount and tell me the relationships between the things he'd counted. We'd make tally marks in groups of 5 to keep track of speech therapy exercises. DS also started to take to maps at the time, so we read several books about maps, took the hiking maps from every local park, and bought him a compass. He was also learning to bake, doing a lot of doubling and halving recipes with me. Living in a house where all members are quite mathy, learning the math has come quite naturally through play and general living.

If a child is asking for something more structured, then provide it as appropriate, but if a 3 year old is just showing a talent for numbers and a love of all things math, do it in an age appropriate manner.

There are some wonderful, playful Math books for that age.

http://www.loreenleedy.com/books/booktitles.html


My son was so excited when he was 4/5 to play junior monopoly. You might want to get one of those games on hand.

Have fun!

Yahtzee is a great idea. My kids play Life now, which involves alot of adding. We also have played 21 poker, which required that they add quickly. Our school had them roll four dice and pretend like they were playing baseball, so you had to add scores quickly to see who won.

We looked at Kumon a few years ago. From what I observed, they focus on (complete) mastery. If I remember correctly, they won’t let a kid move up until he scores 100% on a test in a prescribed amount of time. The math I saw (DS was 7 then) was heavy on math facts and worksheets. My son wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

I worked with him on math facts until he could get ~80% on a quizlet. I figured he’d learn the rest by applying them in the next skill. So, for example, he learned the remaining 20% of his multiplication facts by doing long division, and we never did basic division facts. I didn’t see the point in making him do them (though I do for non-mathy kids). He knows both sets of facts cold now.

IMO, Kumon work is good stuff for getting high scores on straightforward high stakes tests, but it doesn’t address the kinds of more complex things that HG+ kids tend to appreciate. I agree with others who’ve said that the kids described on this forum might not enjoy the repetitive aspects of it.

Added: My other two kids go to a school that emphasizes math facts. I’ve found ways to get around the tedium of memorizing them by teaching little algorithms for math facts. For example, for multiplying the 9s up to 9*10, you subtract 1 from the number you’re multiplying by and that gives you the tens digit.
The two digits in the answer total 9, so you use this fact to derive the ones digit.

Thus, for 9*6,

6-1=5. The tens digit is 5.

5+?=9 and ?=4, so 4 is the ones digit. The answer to 9*6 is 54.

This let me bundle a wee bit of both algebra-think and concepts of patterns in mathematics into what had previously been straight memorization.

Presto! Math facts for gifties!