Review Detail

Most people who use this curriculum absolutely love it. A few problems we have had with it over the years have soured our taste for math a bit, but yes, we are planning to use it again next year. The lessons require a lot of teacher interaction with manipulatives which need to be purchased separately. Lessons are usually daily and can last from 5-30 minutes each. Some of the concepts are a bit tricky to understand and teach when simply looking at the Student Textbook so I would suggest buying the Teacher's Guides as well. This will include the answers to the student workbook as well and extra mental math worksheets. Our main problem has been when my daughter has difficulty with a concept and then doesn't have a review scheduled soon enough to aid in retention. By the time a review is scheduled in the book, she has forgotten the concept completely and requires it to be retaught. About 2/3's of a book will be very simple for her but there are not enough questions or reviews on her areas of difficulty. Toward the end of this year, I finally realized that when I am teaching a lesson and she completely understands it, I should skip to the end and the hardest questions to be certain she is grasping it and then cut the lesson short. I am also only assigning about 3 problems in the workbook from the entire page. If she gets them correct then we move on. This is boosting her self confidence, cutting her arduous lessons shorter, and aiding us in arriving at the next review at a much rapider pace. I'm hoping this approach will help next year by providing us several problems to turn back to for review as needed.