Miquon Math Question

[campbellsoup]

We decided to give Miquon a try this year. I already had the CR's and I thought the approach to math sounded more interesting than any other math curriculum out there. The way I understand, you are supposed to start with the orange book regardless of age. My 3rd grader is a wee bit bored. Can we skip on to the next book or should we stick it out. I don't want to proceed and then he is confused because he needed more familiarity with the "system." What should I do?

[moominmamma]

I would not skip, not totally. I would look at each worksheet and see if he can figure out what to do, how to do it, and why. If he can, there's no need to go through all the games, demonstrations and problems. That might mean you can check off eight or ten or more worksheets in a half-hour session, though they might not have all been technically filled out. He may meet up with some more challenging stuff soon: within the first half of the Orange book they have kids combining addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Another thing you could do in tandem with this is to look for a more advanced topic, and start in on that and focus on it as it's further developed in more advanced books. Say, the grid & arrow games, which I believe start in the Blue book and then continue on quickly in Yellow. This sort of topic-by-topic grazing is definitely encouraged in Miquon. That's why the topics are given letter names -- so you can follow some of them at a different pace than others. That might give him something more interesting to do while solidifying a foundation in the basic operations in the early books.

Miranda

[Roar]

We skipped all over the place with Miquon and our kid got a lot out of it and it worked well for him.

You know your kid - for some kids if they are bored that's the beginning of the end of turning on the whole series. If you feel that's happening I would permit skipping ahead and seeing what happens.

[craft_media_hero]

Do you have the Lab Manuals or other teacher books? The authors talk about how the students who originally worked with the lab sheets would request certain topics from the teachers, the teachers would also give out whatever they thought would benefit the student at the time, some easy work, some challenging.

I agree with mm on combining some of the books. We did Orange/Red together and now are doing Blue/Green, jumping back and forth. I don't think there's anything wrong with working in more than two of the books at a time, but I just didn't want to be working with more than what we already had.

There was a point last year where I was thinking about dropping it, but then she suddenly "got" the Miquon approach, and I was really glad that we stuck it out. For us, that was somewhere toward the end of Orange and middle of Red. Now we are LOVING Blue and Green