Singapore math placement question

[loraxc]

I just gave DD the 1a placement test and she got an 86. They say a score of more than 80 is adequate to move to the next level, so maybe I should get her 1B. However, the things she got wrong were all the same concepts: adding and subtracting numbers greater than 10. She just does not know these facts, although if I had written them vertically for her, she would have been able to do some of them (those without carrying). She did get some of them anyway, by doing it in her head. (She could do things like 11 + 4, but not things like 15 - 9). We have never tried to teach her this stuff and she does not really have strategies, though I'm sure she could do it with manipulatives.

So, 1A or 1B? She does not want to do "easy math" anymore and would like a challenge, but I don't want it to be frustratingly hard. I should mention that her math workbook at school actually has "grade 1" on the cover, though it looks pretty basic for grade 1 to me.

For background, DD says she loves math and is fascinated by concepts like infinity and negative numbers. She is able to do basic multiplication and division in her head and understands fractions. She definitely knows addition and subtraction facts to 10. She can do two-digit addition and subtraction in her head as long as there is no carrying or borrowing. Her K teacher believes that she is "on level" in math and that it is not an interest of hers, but this is not what we see at home, although I do think her reading skills are probably stronger than math. She says math at school is boring and too easy. I would like to do math with her over the summer for 10-15 minutes a day--she is definitely interested.

[loraxc]

Actually--okay, I am looking at 1A on Amazon and the pages they allow me to look at are exactly like what she is doing in K and is bored with (count the objects and write the number, etc.). Looking at the table of contents, 1A does not look like a good fit at all till we get to page 87. So, skip it? But adding and subtracting 10-20 is a pretty basic, key skill that she needs in order to advance, no?

ETA that when I look at 2A, some of that is stuff she can easily do, too, (she would have no trouble at all ordering even very large numbers by amount) but some is stuff she's never seen before. She is just all over the place with what she knows and doesn't (hmm, what a surprise!)

Is Singapore everyone's preferred program? BTW, her school uses Everyday Math (I know everyone here seems to hate it!)

[sapphire_chan]

Dumb question, could you just teach her to rewrite problems vertically? I usually do. Or could you do a week first where you guys just work on the area that she might struggle with and then start 1B or 2A?

[moominmamma]

Skip it. Go to 1B. The only time I mistrusted a Singapore placement test's apparently-too-advanced placement suggestion I regretted it.

She's bright, she wants challenge. Filling gaps in 1st grade math isn't rocket science. If she has some gaps to fill she'll likely do so in the twinkling of an eye.

Miranda

[Bird Girl]

You can always opt to choose just the textbook or the workbook and do that first, then add the text and workbook for the next semester's worth. While Singapore is a curriculum that is written to achieve mastery, there is a spiraling effect, and topics will be re-visited, so even if she does not have everything in 1A, she can fill in those gaps as 2A and 3A come around.

[kgianforti]

Wow....great thread loraxc!

So would that be the general consensus? Going by what the placement test says even if there are a few gaps? Especially if your dc is calling the current level "baby math" and are asking for "harder math". (I know that should be the *hint* to move on but gaps make me nervous even with very bright math students)

[splendid]

The books that are on amazon.com are different from the singapore math books I have at home. I would check out the Intensive Practice books instead of the regular 1A books and then move to the 1B books.

[Linda on the move]

Which ever one you decide on, remember that she doesn't have to do every page. You can just use a nice thick sharpie and draw a line through the pages she already knows. The books are inexpensive. If you want to get one to just do one section, it wouldn't cost that much.

You also might check their return policy and order both of the ones you are considering, planning on returning the first one if it is just too easy.

I also really like "Family Math" for fun math enrichment.

[itsmyturn]

I would say 1B, don't worry abut the gaps, if it is only for enrichment. She will get plenty of add/sub drills at school. trust me!

Her K teacher believes that she is "on level" in math and that it is not an interest of hers,

I also heard this during K and at the beginning of grade 1. To be considered "advanced in math" at school you must be able to properly definine the technical math terms.
My kid learned by osmosis, so we had to back track to teach her the "proper" definitions and steps, to make the school happy, even though she could do the work in her head. sigh~

[daytripper75]

Originally Posted by splendid

The books that are on amazon.com are different from the singapore math books I have at home.

Yes! I would order directly from Singapore Math, that is what I plan to do next time.

[loraxc]

So are the books listed on the SM website harder? Longer? What's the difference?

[moominmamma]

The ones listed as "Singapore Math Practice" don't look to me to be part of the Singaporean national Primary Math curriculum series. My guess is that they are reprints of stuff marketed to parents in Singapore for supplementation and additional drill, similar to the SchoolZone workbooks you can find in Target or Walmart in North America. The ones that are listed as "Singapore Primary Math" (Times Private Media Publishing) are the same as those sold by SingaporeMath.com.

I can't really compare the content of the 1B Practice books to the curriculum, because (a) I've never seen the Math Practice books and (b) we didn't use any Singapore materials until my kids were at a 2B level. I would expect some correlation in content, though it might be fairly loose. I would also assume that the Math Practice books didn't do much actual teaching of new concepts, though I could be wrong about that.

Miranda

[loraxc]

Thanks for the info on that! I went ahead and ordered 1B and 2A directly from the Singapore website.

Forgive the dumb question, but how do most of you go about teaching facts to 20? Manipulatives, finger counting, straight memorization? I'm not totally sure how she learned facts to 10--I guess some of it was learned in class but the rest she seemed to just pick up out of the ether. I know she does a lot of "If 5 and 5 make 10, then 5 and 6 must make 11" sort of stuff, which I consider the "real" way to know facts, but it's much slower, of course.

[sapphire_chan]

There are other ways to do it than by knowing how to get to 10?

If she's up for worksheets, that's a good way to drill that sort of fact to memorization. The first few times she sees "5+6" she'll have to think it through "5+5+1=10+1=11" but do it enough and she'll see "5+6" and know "11" right away.

Since she's not strong on writing yet, you could find an online addition game where she could type an answer instead.

[LynnS6]

You can also supplement the areas where she needs a bit more practice with something like: http://www.math-drills.com/ which has free math drills. They have single digit addition, two digit addition (with and without carrying) and multiple digit addition. (Plus a whole bunch of other stuff.)

[loraxc]

She's sort of mixed on worksheets at this point. Her writing has improved vastly over the course of the school year (she even writes some of her letters with little tails, like in her handwriting book), so that's not really much of an issue. I don't think she likes the math workbooks she has access to very much, but that may just be because they're too basic and tend to involve a lot of coloring and connect the dots and twiddly dee (despite being an amazing artist, she is pretty burned out on coloring). She likes me to give her problems to do on her whiteboard.

I just wan't sure if there was some other "trick" to use to help her learn the facts to 20 without just straight drill? I showed her how to do it on her fingers when she took the 1A test. She did find it a bit tricky at first, but quickly got better at it.

[moominmamma]

Originally Posted by loraxc

Forgive the dumb question, but how do most of you go about teaching facts to 20?

My kids mostly just picked them up from the ether, as you say. But with four kids, I've been observing the ether for a long time, and I have some idea of how they absorbed things.

Basically they developed touchstone facts that they just "knew" and very quickly derived the adjacent facts from them. Touchstone facts were the ones they got so familiar with that they never had to think about them, they were just self-evident. These were things like what you described ... 5+5 is 10, so 5+6 (an adjacent fact) must be 11. Their curiosity and interest in math just led them to develop more and more of these touchstones.

My kids' touchstone facts were initially all the "10+ facts." If 10+6 is 16 (intuitively obvious from place-value understanding), then 9+6 must be 15, and 11+6 must be 17.

If you know that 3+4 is 7, then 13+4 is 17, because it's just got an extra 10. You also know that 14+3 is 17, for the same reason. I think playing with cuisenaire rods as 3- and 4-year-olds helped them learn this.

Gradually the doubles also became touchstones. 6+6 was well-known because of the many dice games we played. If 6+6 is 12, then 6+7 must be 13. They all loved doubling -- exponential growth is so neat. Start with 1 penny, double it and you get 2. Double that and you get to 4, 8 and then 16. (These are the numbers of musical rhythms too, so they were familiar with their relationships from music theory.) The 8+8 fact was part of that. The other doubles gradually became second nature too, just through repeated use.

I honestly think it's best if these strategies get absorbed gradually, led by the child's observations, rather than explicitly taught. If you give a child a half dozen tools, she'll have trouble figuring out which is most efficient to use when. But show her one at a time, or better yet, let her discover them on her own over the course of several weeks or months, and she'll come to know each one intimately and figure out which is most efficient in certain circumstances. Most of our math homeschooling was just play (card games, board games, guessing games) and real life (cooking, organizing, measuring) until the mid-second-grade level.

Miranda

[moominmamma]

And just another comment on the "math facts to 20" issue. In "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics" by Liping Ma, a book which compares the appalling performance of primary school math teachers and students in the US with their counterparts in China, she mentions how important this task is. For the Chinese (for all Asian math curricula, really) this is the whole basis of place value. If children learn how to construct and deconstruct that group of 10 readily, if they learn to see these operations from the left, the right, front, back, top and bottom ... they're totally equipped for things like multi-digit multiplication, decimals, improper fractions and mixed numbers, scientific notation, you name it. All those concepts, of "constructing and deconstructing groups of greater place value," are played out for the first time in "math facts to 20." They spend a long time on this area. The extra time is spent not on drill, but on understanding.

The initially slow but conceptually effective practice you described of your dd deriving 5+6 from 5+5 is as you said: the "real" way to know facts. She's already on the right track!

Miranda

[loraxc]

Mirand, what you describe is EXACTLY what I have observed DD doing, down to knowing the doubles and extrapolating. This is the same knowledge that has led to her intuitively understanding some multiplication and division (she knows 4 + 4 + 4 is 12, so she was quickly able to understand "What is four 3s?" and now "What is 4 x 3?"). However, she is still at the point where she can "naturally" do some of the facts past 10, but is stymied by others (like I said, 11+ 4 yes, 15-9 no). So, you present an interesting question: teach these facts in a more deliberate, memorization-based, less "ether" way, so that she can advance? Or leave it be? This is keeping in mind that she is asking for more math quite actively.

[HeatherB]

Moving over to Learning at Home...