Curriculum Cleanout


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I scoured my bookshelf yesterday and pulled out the stuff that doesn’t work anymore.  I wish I could find good stuff at the library, but you just can’t here.  Unfortunately I seem to be destined to buy things in order to get a good look at them.  But on the bright side I have had the foresight to only buy one grade at a time and so I’m only out less than $50 or so if it doesn’t work out instead of thousands.

I’m mostly talking about math and reading.

With reading I started with a book that was recommended to me “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons”.  It’s actually a great book, but Emma is less than enthusiastic about the program.  She much prefers the pictures and methods of “Explode the Code”.

Then on to Math.  I am morally opposed to buying more than one set of curriculum.  Since almost all math programs require a text book AND a workbook, buying two sets of textbooks and learning two different methods of helping them learn just rubs me the wrong way.

So I started with Saxon.  Also an excellent program.  It also is the curriculum that most other programs funnel into later by the high school years.  It worked great for Lucy… again, not so much for Emma.  I moved on to Singapore Math, which was much better for her.  Very colorful, and much easier for her to apply to real life.  In fact, she loved it.  Math was her favorite subject…  Enter Arithmetic.

So I started looking into a THIRD method for math.  Math U See was catching my eye and my heart, but I didn’t want to buy something if it was just going to stop working in less than a year.  But I lucked out!  A homeschooling friend from down the street has it and let me borrow it to check out.  This one, unlike the others, comes with a DVD for the lessons rather than a text.  Emma was glued to the TV and to be honest, so was I.

Matt is really great at math.  He’s like a human calculator (as in, does advanced calculus in his head when he’s bored).  He looks at a little bit differently than I do.  For me, math is hard and I tend to keep a calculator (or Matt) close at hand so I don’t get caught with my pants down.

While I was watching these videos I was instantly aware of the fact that the way they teach math with Math U See is exactly the kind of way that Matt looks at math.  And since I want my kids to be better than me, this is what we are going with this time.  But I’m still wary.  I won’t be getting more than the levels we are at now.

So I sucked up my pride and put my no longer useful curriculum on ebay.  No point in crying over it or holding on to it hoping that I’ll have a chance to use it later on.  We’re really trying not to become hoarders.  The reading book was sold in minutes!  I hope the math sells quickly too.

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