Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Supplementing Common Core Math with Traditional

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.