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Saxon Math 6/5


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Is anyone here using Saxon Math 6/5 with their 5th grader? I ordered it last week and it came in the mail today.

 

Patrick did the first two lessons today and I have to say that it doesn't look any more challenging than what he was doing for CLE 4th grade math.

 

Do any other kids say that it's easy/boring? Did it get more challenging for them? How many lessons does your child do per day? Also, if he finishes it in just a few months, what do I get next?

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We're using 6/5 with DD11 and DD9 (6th and 4th graders). We've only ever used Saxon Math. In the middle school Math levels, the first bunch of lessons are review, and then it gets harder.

 

My DDs do a lesson a day, 5 days a week. We count the tests and investigations as one lesson as well.

 

After Saxon 6/5 comes 7/6.

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DS is doing 7/6 and now that he is taking his time and paying closer attention to what he's doing, rather than rushing through it, it takes him about 60-90 minutes to get a lesson done. He gets distracted easily too so sometimes he'll work on it for a bit, then do something else and come back to it.

 

Yes, the first portion of the text is review, but it'll get more challenging. We did 5/4 last year and I decided to see what he can do with 7/6 this year, so we actually skipped 6/5, guess we'll see if that back-fires soon enough. We all like Saxon though and are very happy with it, even DS who doesn't like math.

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Saxon starts out each grade with review, that can be so easy for many students. It will pick up, peek ahead to lesson 80, it won't take that long to get going, but it may help seeing the direction.

 

You can always have him take the tests and find a good place to start in the text.

 

Is anyone here using Saxon Math 6/5 with their 5th grader? I ordered it last week and it came in the mail today.

 

Patrick did the first two lessons today and I have to say that it doesn't look any more challenging than what he was doing for CLE 4th grade math.

 

Do any other kids say that it's easy/boring? Did it get more challenging for them? How many lessons does your child do per day? Also, if he finishes it in just a few months, what do I get next?

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My ds 5th grade is using Saxon 65. Previously he'd used MUS up through...the one with fractions. Delta? Omicron? No wait, it was Epsilon! lol

 

Anyway...we're about 65 lessons into it and some days are definitely easier, but we do all the mental math which does increase in difficulty and when I've remembered to copy them, we do the fact sheets.

 

I still make him do all the problems, but not necessarily all the practice problems, especially if it's a topic he has down cold. His one tendency is to think he knows something and then they'll present it a different way, so we have to be careful about that.

 

On any given day, assuming he is working diligently and not talking to his sister every 5 minutes, it takes him 30-45 minutes for each lesson, plus a few minutes for me to explain it and do the mental math.

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Saxon 65 for us this year has been a lot of review, much more than for Saxon 54. At the start of the year, DD was doing two lessons a day (listening to the DIVE CD), with the mental math and practice problems. Once she got fairly far into it (I'm thinking lesson 40), we slowed down to one lesson a day, with mental math and the actual problem set. We still haven't hit much that seems new.

 

Erica in OR

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We're finding our place in 6/5 after having tried 7/6 and realized we needed to plug some holes. We switched from Singapore this year and I thought 7/6 would work, but started seeing a real downward trend in the test scores (really hit hard about test 8). I did a phone consultation (free) with Art Reed, a veteran Saxon teacher and former employee of Saxon, http://www.homeschoolwithsaxon.com/ and he gave me some advice, including dropping back down to 6/5. His instructions for our situation were to do the tests until she gets less than an 80 twice in a row, then back up several lessons and start doing the lessons and problem sets from there (as well as reviewing what she missed on the tests). So far we are up to test 9, so we'll see how much further we get before starting lessons.

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The first x number of chapters are review of the earlier grade, so you may wish to skip them. It's been a few years, but there are a lot of review chapters. What I did with my eldest in 76 was to have her take the tests before doing the chapters and then have her do the lessons for problems she missed. That was the one level I bought her new, so I had the tests.

 

Dd did Saxon for 3 levels, although I did not remain a Saxon fan. She self taught, or she probably would have done fewer. I used it for my second dd, and we switched out of it sooner. That said, my eldest is mathy, so she retained her math well. The only shortcoming was in the word problem area, but she also did SM 6A and part of B which helped with that.

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