Math Time
(This is a companion story to my article "Why Americans Lag Behind Other Countries in Math Profieciency". You can find it on Helium.com.)
My children are home schooled. When I started my daughter in a math program at K-5, I took the advice of a veteran home school mother and teacher who had successfully educated her children at home and used a standard math curriculum which is used by public and private schools across the country. Though I was a bit concerned with the introduction of multiplication problems in the 1st grade book, I was somewhat satisfied with the curriculum.
When we reached the 3rd grade book, however, my slight concern turned to serious concern. For one thing, the curriculum was hopping from one area of math to another, and no area was covered very thoroughly. Reaching back to my childhood experience, I remembered two things about 3rd grade math. We spent every day for an entire school year learning our multiplication tables, and we spent the remainder of our time nailing down addition and subtraction problems using 3 and 4 digits.
Not wanting my child to miss out on what everyone else was learning in 3rd grade, we finished up the book and spent the remainder of the year learning multiplication tables. When I was satisfied my daughter knew her multiplication tables, I went in search of a better math program.
Since I was still fairly new to educating my children at home, I again relied on the testimony of other successful home school parents. By far, the math program of choice was Saxon Math. I went to the curriculum bookstore, and again the recommendaton was Saxon Math. The mistake I made was to only scan through the books. Though the program was different, it seemed to cover what my daughter needed for the next level of math, so I bought it. By Christmas, my daughter was flunking math. My daugher had never really struggled with math before. I was stumped.
Not knowing what else to do, we continued to plough through the Saxon 5/4. Every day there were tears, and my daughter began to show signs of rebellion. One morning when she was refusing to even look at her math book, I picked up the book hoping to come up with some new way to approach the subject. The lesson for the day covered a new multiplication concept, a new geometry concept and a new fractions concept. That's when it hit me. This program was not building one idea upon another. Just like all the other programs, it was hopping, skipping and jumping from one thing to the next every day relying on the daily review problems to reinforce concepts learned in the previous lessons. It was no wonder my daughter was failing. I would have failed math using this approach.
That day, I tossed Saxon Math to the side and bought my daughter a multiplication/division drill book and set her to honing her skills while I went, yet again, in search of a good math program. Unfortunately, this was not an easy task. I soon learned that the U.S. standard approach to math at the elementary level is to hop, skip, and jump from one concept to the next just giving the student enough information to pass that year's standardized test. Every program I looked at used this approach. My conversations with public school math teachers confirmed what I saw in the textbooks. I knew this was not how I had learned math. When I spoke to my mother who, incidentally, is a math wizard, she confirmed that she did not learn math by the hop, skip and jump method either. (I have since learned that this is called the spiral method.)
My search lasted over 6 months. One day while I was doing some online research on math programs, I stumbled upon Singapore Math, a program based on the one used in Singapore schools. (Singapore's math students score top in math internationally.) The Singapore Math approach is to teach a student a concept until it is mastered, then build the concept on top of that. Each math concept is approached from every possible angle. Students not only learn to solve the problems on paper, but they are challenged to think through them in their head and to draw pictures, if necessary. By the 4th grade level, students are introduced to simple algebraic thinking in their word problems. By 6th grade, students have mastered algebraic thinking though they have yet to see an algebraic equation. The next level for grade 7 is Algebra.
Further research on Singapore Math convinced me that the only way to solve our math woes was to switch immediately. After a year and a half using Singapore Math with my daughter (and now my other daughter in the 1st grade), I will not switch back to standard U.S. Math curriculum. My math skills have improved while I've been teaching, and my daughters are learning to think logically and solve problems. What more could I ask?
My children are home schooled. When I started my daughter in a math program at K-5, I took the advice of a veteran home school mother and teacher who had successfully educated her children at home and used a standard math curriculum which is used by public and private schools across the country. Though I was a bit concerned with the introduction of multiplication problems in the 1st grade book, I was somewhat satisfied with the curriculum.
When we reached the 3rd grade book, however, my slight concern turned to serious concern. For one thing, the curriculum was hopping from one area of math to another, and no area was covered very thoroughly. Reaching back to my childhood experience, I remembered two things about 3rd grade math. We spent every day for an entire school year learning our multiplication tables, and we spent the remainder of our time nailing down addition and subtraction problems using 3 and 4 digits.
Not wanting my child to miss out on what everyone else was learning in 3rd grade, we finished up the book and spent the remainder of the year learning multiplication tables. When I was satisfied my daughter knew her multiplication tables, I went in search of a better math program.
Since I was still fairly new to educating my children at home, I again relied on the testimony of other successful home school parents. By far, the math program of choice was Saxon Math. I went to the curriculum bookstore, and again the recommendaton was Saxon Math. The mistake I made was to only scan through the books. Though the program was different, it seemed to cover what my daughter needed for the next level of math, so I bought it. By Christmas, my daughter was flunking math. My daugher had never really struggled with math before. I was stumped.
Not knowing what else to do, we continued to plough through the Saxon 5/4. Every day there were tears, and my daughter began to show signs of rebellion. One morning when she was refusing to even look at her math book, I picked up the book hoping to come up with some new way to approach the subject. The lesson for the day covered a new multiplication concept, a new geometry concept and a new fractions concept. That's when it hit me. This program was not building one idea upon another. Just like all the other programs, it was hopping, skipping and jumping from one thing to the next every day relying on the daily review problems to reinforce concepts learned in the previous lessons. It was no wonder my daughter was failing. I would have failed math using this approach.
That day, I tossed Saxon Math to the side and bought my daughter a multiplication/division drill book and set her to honing her skills while I went, yet again, in search of a good math program. Unfortunately, this was not an easy task. I soon learned that the U.S. standard approach to math at the elementary level is to hop, skip, and jump from one concept to the next just giving the student enough information to pass that year's standardized test. Every program I looked at used this approach. My conversations with public school math teachers confirmed what I saw in the textbooks. I knew this was not how I had learned math. When I spoke to my mother who, incidentally, is a math wizard, she confirmed that she did not learn math by the hop, skip and jump method either. (I have since learned that this is called the spiral method.)
My search lasted over 6 months. One day while I was doing some online research on math programs, I stumbled upon Singapore Math, a program based on the one used in Singapore schools. (Singapore's math students score top in math internationally.) The Singapore Math approach is to teach a student a concept until it is mastered, then build the concept on top of that. Each math concept is approached from every possible angle. Students not only learn to solve the problems on paper, but they are challenged to think through them in their head and to draw pictures, if necessary. By the 4th grade level, students are introduced to simple algebraic thinking in their word problems. By 6th grade, students have mastered algebraic thinking though they have yet to see an algebraic equation. The next level for grade 7 is Algebra.
Further research on Singapore Math convinced me that the only way to solve our math woes was to switch immediately. After a year and a half using Singapore Math with my daughter (and now my other daughter in the 1st grade), I will not switch back to standard U.S. Math curriculum. My math skills have improved while I've been teaching, and my daughters are learning to think logically and solve problems. What more could I ask?
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