Arithmetic facts - Page 2

[SweetSilver]

Originally Posted by Seana 

 I was considering various curricula, but I think I have enough materials for facts for a while, plus other things (workbooks, the book "Family Math" and a set of first Grade Brain Quest) to take up at least the entire summer. I just want to get her up to grade level (as opposed to where she and her class are at her school).

Have you ever read Anno's Math Games and it's sequels?  They read almost like story books.  The n+1 that is being discussed here is represented in a section by a magic machine.  3 birds fly in one side and 4 come out the other.  Then 4 dragonflies go in and 5 come out.  First you are asked, what does this machine do, anyway?  Once you've figured out what this fantastic machine does you are asked, what would happen if the 4 birds flew back through again? And again?  And again?  Then what would happen if the flew in the opposite direction?  What do you suppose would happen then?

I just love this series, because there are no places to write an answer, you can just read it like a book.  Sometimes the scenarios are pretty fantastical, like magic glue and the magic machine mentioned above.  The three books altogether cover a lot of math concepts.  What I love most, besides the art and storybook style, is that the concepts are taught in a way that is anything but memorization.  I was always good at memorization in school, and it has served me quite well in a basic way, but purely visual, mental concepts are extremely slippery in my brain, and that is what these books focus on.  Wonderful books for first-graders like my oldest daughter.  

[Seana]

Ack!, Learning is so complicated!  (and I have a master's in Education!)  

[SweetSilver]

Originally Posted by Seana 

Ack!, Learning is so complicated!  (and I have a master's in Education!)  

Luckily homeschooling does not need to follow a prescribed order.  My daughter figured out the concept of multiplication shortly after she learned to add and loooooong before she thought about subtraction.  

Sometimes I think that folks with education degrees have a harder time *embarking* on homeschooling than those of us without.  I have nothing to back that statement up, it's just something I notice and wonder about sometimes.  If something my daughters do is entirely different from what they are "supposed" to be learning at whatever age it's easy for me to accept and rewrite what I understand about how kids learn.  Perhaps because I'm just learning how *my* kids learn and haven't bothered much about how kids learn in general.  Am I making sense?  I mostly just take things as they come, with a bit of a view of what's on the horizon and my overall goals.  

When starting out I think that less can be more.  Especially, less thinking, more observing.

[PGTlatte]

Originally Posted by Seana 

Ack!, Learning is so complicated!  (and I have a master's in Education!)  

It is very individual.  With math, some people can get a concept first and then have no trouble learning facts in a haphazard way and assembling them all to be organized in their heads.  Others can get the concept fine, but find it impossible to accumulate the facts without a methodical, gradually building approach.  And some people really do better to memorize first because that is easier for them, and then with lots of practice, the picture of how the numbers relate to each other comes together in their head and that is how they finally get the concept.  I think I am the last kind and when I learned math, the approach that was used was the opposite of what I needed, and I was a kid who was labeled with a "learning disability" in math, staying years behind and having to repeat classes...and it really didn't come together for me until college.  I don't want our kids to have the same struggles, so I experiment to see what is the best way for each of them to both learn the facts and get the concepts.  DS2 is completely different than DS1.  He gets the concept of addition, and he is catching facts like bugs in a net and retaining them without any need to learn them in order.  He could probably learn them really well through games that offer random fact-salad.  But DS1 just can't get them that way.  I tried it that way for 2.5 years and he just could not learn like that.  This is his 3rd grade year and I have had to stop all math and take him back through the beginning with a program that does it in a more methodical way.  He is finally learning them.  I wish I had realized earlier that this was the approach he needed.  Not many math programs do it this way anymore, because it's very boring, old-fashioned etc.  But this is what he needed all along. 

[pigpokey]

Look at Timez Attack.  They have a free beta (I think) of the addition and subtraction modules. 

We have done memorization for multiplication and division with Timez Attack.  If we get much further and anyone needs fingers for 9 + 6 or 12 - 4 then we'll have to break it back out.