(By the way, Math Made Easy also covers fractions, et.al. For number theory, probability, money problems, and word problems, I went through the fifth grade Math Made Easy table of contents and wrote down all the appropriate page numbers. The subjects that are covered by Key To books are easy, Bean is doing the second book for each of those. When I wrote up my plan for the year, I went through Home Learning Year by Year and looked at each math topic she outlined. So for fifth grade I decided to see if she was ready to approach math in a more disciplined way, tackling one topic at a time. Because we were jumping around so much, the things she didn't find as interesting weren't sticking and she wasn't getting enough consistent practice. If there was a developmental issue, that was it. That is, she was developmentally ready to do the work correctly, but wasn't applying her attention effectively. By the end of the year, she had finished book one in most of the Key To books and was very confident with fractions and geometry, but she still didn't know most of the multiplication tables and was behind in her other computation skills (multi-number addition, subtraction, and division.) I knew the problem had more to do with application problem than a intellectual development. She liked the variety, and that kept her interested and working, but the results were inconsistent. Last year, Bean was using all of these workbooks at the same time: Fractions one day, Geometry the next, etc. For kids who can figure out their own way from raw numbers to solutions and for parents who feel reasonably confident in guiding them there without a cheat sheet, these books are more than adequate - a fact our homeschool consultant has vetted more than once. It's not Singapore, Saxon, Right Start, or any other program popular with homeschoolers, and as such doesn't have conference cred, but Bean really likes the no nonsense layout and that aside from a few examples, there are no prescribed ways to do the work. Intellectual snob that I am, it would be easy to overlook a workbook like this if it weren't effective.
#Lost in the storm carol carrick series#
Math Made Easy is a workbook series published by DK, which is available from Amazon, and periodically Costco. I supplemented with the fourth grade Math Made Easy book for number theory, operations, and probability. Īrmed with the Key To books, I outlined my plan for fourth grade last year, using Book 1 from the Key to Fractions, Decimals, Geometry and Measurement series. As soon as it was clear that Bean liked the style of this series and was willing to do the work, I ordered the entire series for each topic: Decimals, Geometry, Measurement, Metric Measurement, Percentages, and Algebra. When I saw that each book was only four dollars, I had no problem ordering the entire Fraction series. Each series covers one topic over four to eight workbooks, with each workbook representing about one grade level worth of work, and they are recommended for 4-12 graders. We were at the end of the third grade academic year, so I looked at Rupp's suggestions for fourth grade and saw that she suggested the Key To series for Fractions, Decimals, Geometry, and Measurement from Key Curriculum Press. My homeschooling bible that is, Home Learning Year by Year, by Rebecca Rupp. When she realized this was the same thing as just doing the problems in a workbook, she was no longer interested.īy this time in our lives as homeschoolers, we had been through enough cycles of smooth sailing, hitting brick walls, and starting over with something else that this was a familiar pattern and I had a fallback position for the next time this happened in any subject. About a month after I wrote that post, Bean stopped being willing to make colorful pictures out of the solutions to various types of equations so I let her just do the problems themselves. At the time, I thought we would do that until it didn't work anymore. At the time, we were more or less "unschooling" math, and I was letting Bean engage in math play instead of doing structured work that moved along in a more or less orderly fashion. One of the first posts I wrote for this blog was about math.
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