Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Review of Math-U-See

I am completely impressed.

It is spendy but so far, it is worth every penny. We have only done two lessons each kid... but things I was trying to get into Cyan's head for most of last year, she got in those two lessons. It could be that she is just more ready for Place Value and other concepts like that now... she is older. It could also be that I laid down a good enough foundation that she was able to pick it up really fast. But I like the set up of Math-U-See very much. The idea of watching the video, touching the blocks, and doing the problems all at once is very appealing and quite effective. I don't think we will be going back to Singapore Math. It is great for concepts when kids are just starting out... but the lack of instructions for kids OR teachers just makes the higher levels way more complicated. And by higher levels I mean book 3. Like 2nd grade math. I am really enjoying the change.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a question. We are doing Singapore, we finished book 1b and 2a last year (DD was in 2nd grade) This year we are struggling to remember simple math facts (addition and subtraction) So we have not started with book 2b - i really thought about Math-U-See and I see you love it. Do you still? Which book/level did you finish in singapore and start in Math-U-see.
My DD can figure out all the questions in the workbook - then I noticed she could not come up with the answers to 7+8 or 14-6 (etc) if asked and I asked how she was getting her answer correct - she counts! urgh!!!
Thanks for all your help. Just stumbled on your site from small world. I am putting in favs!

Val in the Rose Garden said...

Hi Tina! Thanks for stopping by.

We did love Math-U-See and used it all through Gama for Cyan and Prealgebra for Alex. The system works and it is a lovely program. I started with Alpha after Singapore because Cyan never really got much out of Singapore honestly. Just like your daughter, she was having trouble doing simple addition and subtraction without counting. Both my children did well with Math-U-See.

We have started Teaching Textbooks this year and we LOVE it! I think that, for the younger grades (ie: up until middle school) Math-u-See and Teaching Textbooks are pretty on par, but once you get into the higher grades, TT goes into so much more than MUS and so, to make it easy, I switched them both.

I would look at some sample lessons from both of those curriculums if you are looking to change what you are doing. :)

Blessings,

Val