Educating the Wheelers

I primarily write about our finances (when I do write, heh), but that’s because the kids are still young and we weren’t doing much by way of formal school. I think I can safely say that has now changed. Audrey is asking for school every day now. So what does that entail?

Primarily, it’s math, and that’s what I’ll talk about in this first post.

We use Singapore Math, and I love it. Math is extremely important in our house, and the initial reason why we decided to homeschool in the first place — to avoid the “constructivist” math that is currently taught in most public (and some private!) schools. There are two primary math curriculums (among many others, but perhaps that can be another post) that homeschoolers choose from: Singapore and Saxon. Singapore is the official curriculum of that country, and is notable because they tend to rank #1 in international student math competitions (like TIMSS). It excels in mathematical thinking and problem solving. Saxon is an extremely thorough, incremental, scripted lesson plan originally written by a homeschooling father. They’re both good, but I suspect is you’re really “into” math, Singapore is the better choice. If you’re less confident about your ability to teach math, Saxon is likely the better choice. This can be a big mayo vs. Miracle Whip-style debate, but I’m just saying where we come down on it.

The Singapore “Earlybird” Kindergarten texts were OK, but pretty heavy on learning to write the numbers and number words. In our case, we started with someone who loved math and hated writing so they pretty well spooked her. For a few months, we ended up switching to Miquon which, ironically, is a discovery-based curriculum — the very thing we wanted to avoid in public school. Of course, the reason why we used it was because it can involve almost no writing on the part of the student, and we only used it until she got over that hump. We’re back to Singapore now, using the first grade texts.

One complaint about Singapore is that it doesn’t provide enough practice — but that’s only true if you only use the initial textbook and workbook. There are also multiple supplemental books, and we use all of them: “Challenging Word Problems,” “Intensive Practice” and “Extra Practice.” Between the text, the original workbook and the three supplements, I assure you, there is plenty of practice. Heh. And Audrey loves it. She loves bouncing back and forth between the different books, deciding which one to do next. The multiple sources all attack the concept (at the moment, addition up to 10) from a variety of different ways. I was originally thinking of supplementing with a different curriculum for different methods, but I haven’t felt that need lately. (I’d probably either use Miquon again — I do think constructivist tests make a good supplement, just an extraordinarily bad primary curriculum — or maybe something like Math Mammoth. I’d love to try Math on the Level, but oy! Maybe if I win the lottery. The price isn’t exactly conducive to just “trying.”)

So how is homeschooling going? Absolutely great, really. I can already see it’s greatest academic benefit — we started math, and ran into a developmental block. So we were able to back up, use a new curriculum until she was ready, and then we got back on track. What would have happened there if she was just one of 30 kids and had to go along with the lesson plan? Perhaps you think that it would be “better” for a student to have to face the content that they’re not developmentally ready for and just get over that hump at the time that it is presented, and, well, vive le difference!