Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Beast Academy Experiences?

DS5.5 will technically be in "first grade" in the fall (We homeschool.) and is somewhat mathy. He resists a lot of formal teaching work and I haven't much pushed things this past year.

He doesn't have the math facts down yet, but understands the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We've done some work with traditional algorithmic methods of adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. He tries to do them in his head and sometimes gets it wrong.

When I look at the pre-test for Beast Academy, there's some I know he could do and some that he's never been exposed to (due to lack of formal curriculum), but I think that if he was introduced to the ideas, he could do it.

I'm attracted to BA because of the comic book format and the challenge of the problems (some of the samples stumped me for awhile). I thought because it looks "fun" and "hard" that he might be more interested. (I bought RightStart last year and it hasn't gone over well at all.)

However, he might not be there yet. I know that it's meant for 3rd graders and mathy kids in general, so maybe I'm being too hopeful or something.

I'd love to hear experiences with it, what your child was doing prior to starting BA and how they liked it. I'm wondering if I should just jump into it or maybe find something else to do for another year or half. We don't have a lot of money to be buying things that aren't right.

We bought the available BA books for DS8 for homeschooling. He likes them, especially because they're in comic book form. Because they're just out, DD7 picks them up now and then and reads them. She's not particularly mathy, but I like the idea of her browsing math books for fun.

So, even if the work itself is too difficult, it might be worth having the books around just to read.

My dd likes the comic books from BA, but has lots of other living math books she prefers. Stuart Murphy, Number Devil, Greg Tang books and the Time Life I Love Math books were favs in first grade. Now she likes Murderous Maths, MOEMS problem solving books and some by DK that cover number history, economics, etc.

For curriculum, we sort of unschooled math with living books until she was 7, then moved quickly through the Singapore Math Standards elementary books.

I wouldn't buy BA, yet. Check your library or find used copies of the some other living math books.

http://www.livingmath.net/Home/tabid/250/language/en-US/Default.aspx

Bean

We started Beast Academy -- 3rd grade shapes/angles. It's the first time I've seen DS struggle with math. I can't tell if it's the geometry concepts (we haven't done much geometry), the format, or simply that he has to "think harder" than he's accustomed to.

My thoughts are, if you homeschool, use Beast Academy as a challenging supplement to another core math curriculum. For us, Singapore math has hit the spot for challenging without meltdowns:)

We're continuing with Beast Academy as a supplement to the school curriculum (Singapore).