Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Connected Math

I'm researching curriculums and was wondering if anybody has experience with Connected Math, or if their child has used it in school. Thanks!

DS used it for half of last year (after he was accelerated mid-year). He only brought home the textbook for a few weeks and then started doing homework off an online program (and I wasn't looking at it), so I can't say much about the curriculum, other than I didn't see anything glaringly wrong with it and it taught concepts a lot better than the curriculum DD was using at a different school (Holt). I felt like with Holt, she was just learning to do calculations and didn't actually understand the math. Connected Math had a lot of word problems, for instance in the fraction unit. DS also went from saying he hated math to "math is my favorite subject". He said that the math class was really "fun". I think if he had been placed in Holt he would have continued saying he hates math, even if it was the right level. My understanding is that a lot of in-class manipulatives and some group work are also involved with Connected math.

Our middle school used this program. Overall, i agree with blackcat above. In general, i thought it required a deeper understanding than many programs I have read about. In particular, there were challenge problems which i thought were quite good- word problems which really asked a lot of students at this level. The program did require a lot of writing, which we found to be part of it's strength (lots of written/long answer explanations) but i recognize that many on this forum find this approach onerous.

Some caveats- probably due to our district's strict "one size fits all" approach, the program was too slow-paced and low-level for my kids, by quite a bit (years). The above-mentioned challenge problems were good ones, but at our school were assigned once a week as a challenge; our kids generally solved the problems before the class period was done. (They were still expected to write a logical, coherent expalnation of their solution, which could take a bit more time).

Also, our district supplements math heavily with local, teacher-developed materials, and I didn't make any effort to distinguish between the commercial curriculum and the local supplements, as our kids didn't need any paretal involvement. I let them handle it on their own, with the exception of reading their challenge problem solutions, mainly out of curiousity (as long as the solution could be supported, their answer was acceptable, so their different approaches were often interesting to read and gave insight into their thought processes).

I'm asking because dd will use connected math grade 6 this upcoming school year (if I don't homeschool her). She's going into 4th grade.

DS was in second and it seemed to be about the right level for him, but the written answer component did indeed bog him down. His teacher knows he has special needs and didn't make him "explain" everything, he just had to write his answer. On the one test that I have there is a question "Use an example probelm & your words to explain the steps you would follow to add or subract two fractions with different denominators." DS had obviously had someone scribe his answer, which was rather rambling.

Other questions on this test involve recipes with fractions but they have to triple the recipe or find 3/4 of the recipe. An example of a word problem is "If there are 15 cups of punch in the punchbowl and the glasses the students are using each hold 3/4 of a cup, how many glasses can you fill?" Luckily it doesn't say "Explain 3 different ways to solve this problem, showing all the steps" or anything like that. I know other math curriculums get bogged down with that, but this one seems reasonable.