Math Update

It's been an awfully long time since I've written much about curriculum and such so I figured I would give an update on math. We are currently using three!!! different math texts right now. It is a bit crazy, but has been kind of nice.

We put Abeka on the shelf for a little bit, and I've just pulled out a page here and there to make sure the kiddos still remember how to do long division and multiplication.

Life of Fred is still on schedule for Fridays. My assessment of it is this: it is great fun and a different take on math. However, it is not ideal as a total math curriculum. The concepts are introduced in a clever way, but not fully taught and explained. In order to grasp them, you need to do additional exercises and explanations. I doubt most kids are able to grasp many math processes in just one or two examples. That being said, the kids like it, it is a great complement, and we will continue using it as we have.

The new curriculum we began using at the first of the year is Professor B. I admit it looks cheesy and does not have the nice layout and pictures Abeka has. However, it has been a nice change for us. It is very oral driven with lots of teacher work on the board with students answering questions. I haven't actually purchased the workbooks as we are still in the trial phase so I just give the kiddos a couple of examples to do. We have so far gone over place value, prime factorization (lots of fun), and beginning fractions (we had already done this with Abeka). I did not like their way of doing long multiplication and long division...maybe because we had already learned those and were doing pretty well with them. The kids have liked it better because there hasn't been gobs of workbook pages to do and most of the session is working together. On the other hand, what Hannah particularly needs is time to figure it out on her own rather than depending on mommy's leading questions. So, I guess the verdict is still out on this one...we'll use it for a while longer and see. I have liked how it is teaching the kids to think rather than just do.

We've made a number of new creatures for our ocean box over the last month
and finally got around to putting them in their box