7th Grade Math: Jacobs EA vs Singapore NEM.

[UlrikeDG]

Hi. I'm back after disappearing for a couple of years, because I have a question.

We've been happily using Singapore math for 7 years now. DS is about to finish book 6B, which means it's time to start a new series. My research has narrowed things down (I know I'm NOT interested in Saxon or Teaching Textbooks), but I feel like I don't have enough information to make a purchase. I'm leaning toward Singapore New Elementary Math or Jacobs Elementary Algebra, both of which get good reviews, but I haven't seen them compared to each other anywhere.

I've also found that most reviews assume that homeschooling parents are too math-phobic to teach algebra. I'm not worried about algebra at all. (Calculus might kick my butt. Maybe. But algebra is not calculus. ) That makes it hard to find review that are really relevant.

Does anyone have any experience with either or both of these curricula? If not, where else can I look for advice?

[UlrikeDG]

Bump.

If no one has any experience with these books, does anyone know where else I could ask?

[moominmamma]

I'm using Singapore New Math Counts (not NEM, but similar, with the same basic content spread out over four years rather than three) with my second kid now. We chose NMC rather than NEM because I was looking for something that didn't move too quickly. I confess we've really struggled with the transition from Singapore Primary to whatever the next step is. That's partly because my kids have finished Singapore Primary at fairly young ages (9-ish) and haven't been ready for the more high-schoolish approach that typically follows. But we've also been hard-pressed to find anything that has the spare, clear, low-repetition style of Singapore Primary while continuing to promote good mathematical thinking.

We've tried so much with my various kids ... Teaching Textbooks, Life of Fred, Singapore NMC, two different Canadian school series (Addison-Wesley and MathPower) and Art of Problem Solving.

I really dislike the standard US practice of dividing math up at the high school level into year-long sub-subjects like Algebra and Geometry. Although we tried that mono-diet style at various stages, mixing it up a bit with other resources, we've come back around to Singaporean Math because it teaches a range of mathematics topics at each level. My 11-year-old is actually really happy with NMC this time around. A year ago it was too visually compressed and college-like for her, but now she's okay with that and is flying through it. My now-16-year-old did two years' worth of NMC and then went on to the Canadian Addison-Wesley series at the local high school at the trig/pre-calc level and was well-prepared for it.

I actually really like the Art of Problem Solving books too; you might look into those. They were just too challenging for my then-10-year-old to do independently, as was her insistent approach. She got bogged down three or four chapters into Intro to Algebra and lost steam in Geometry as a side effect. But for an older or highly gifted math students, they'd be great.

Sorry I don't have any experience with Jacobs. This probably hasn't been any help at all, but no one else had piped up ...

Miranda

[UlrikeDG]

No, no! Don't apologize. There was lots of good info in there, even if you can't compare it to Jacobs. Thank you very much for taking the time to write it out.