Hi. 
: I'm relatively new to homeschooling - we pulled our 8 1/2 year old son from private school grade 3 in mid November of this year. We're slowly starting to add "school" to our regular daily routine. We're taking our time moving into a home study setup and so far we're happy with most of our materials We are terribly frustrated with math, unfortunately. He LOVES math. I hate math. We both have opposite learning styles - he's auditory, I'm visual. Thankfully we are both kinesthetic learners so I understand and encourage his need to move around while he works. He also hates hates hates to write. We're doing a lot of his work orally so that we can "save" his precious fingers for handwriting practice and math worksheets.
Presently, we're using Saxon math grade 3, simply b/c that's where he came from in school. The spiral review is about to drive us both crazy. We're doing 3 lessons/day simply b/c we're skipping the monotonous single digit addition review and doing other fun things like playing online math games to reinforce multiplication facts. This would be ok if I enjoyed math or were comfortable teaching it, but I'm not. Math makes me nervous, unhappy and usually very grumpy. We need something different.
I've looked at Singapore, Rod & Staff, Math U See, Saxon and the Aleks program. Singapore is tempting but I fear my ability to instruct would be lacking in a program like that. I'm really, really tempted to do the Aleks program and let him learn completely online at this point. Is Aleks something that can totally replace a paper and pencil program or is it more supplementary? Can anyone give me some sound advice in the math arena?
: I'm relatively new to homeschooling - we pulled our 8 1/2 year old son from private school grade 3 in mid November of this year. We're slowly starting to add "school" to our regular daily routine. We're taking our time moving into a home study setup and so far we're happy with most of our materials We are terribly frustrated with math, unfortunately. He LOVES math. I hate math. We both have opposite learning styles - he's auditory, I'm visual. Thankfully we are both kinesthetic learners so I understand and encourage his need to move around while he works. He also hates hates hates to write. We're doing a lot of his work orally so that we can "save" his precious fingers for handwriting practice and math worksheets.Presently, we're using Saxon math grade 3, simply b/c that's where he came from in school. The spiral review is about to drive us both crazy. We're doing 3 lessons/day simply b/c we're skipping the monotonous single digit addition review and doing other fun things like playing online math games to reinforce multiplication facts. This would be ok if I enjoyed math or were comfortable teaching it, but I'm not. Math makes me nervous, unhappy and usually very grumpy. We need something different.
I've looked at Singapore, Rod & Staff, Math U See, Saxon and the Aleks program. Singapore is tempting but I fear my ability to instruct would be lacking in a program like that. I'm really, really tempted to do the Aleks program and let him learn completely online at this point. Is Aleks something that can totally replace a paper and pencil program or is it more supplementary? Can anyone give me some sound advice in the math arena?
