Beast Academy Question?

[FlyingMOm]

I've purchased 3A for my rising 3rd grader and I'm trying to work out the scheduling for our year. I cannot find anywhere on the website a list of how many total lessons there are for the entire year (3A, 3B, 3C, 3D). I also can't seem to figure out if each lesson is supposed to be for one day or one week. Can someone help me out here? Thanks!

[Heather R]

Yeah, it's hard to schedule. They don't really split apart nicely into "lessons". Some days we'd get 4 pages done, other days, only 1. I'd plan to do math for a set amount of time each day, and try to get through one guide & practice book roughly every 9 weeks. Hope that helps!

Heather

[TracyP]

I agree. It is not something that you sit down and schedule for the year. We read a section and do 1, maybe 2, pages on the reading days. When we are through with the text we work through the wb at a pace of 2-3 pages per day. I can take a chapter and schedule it out pretty easy this way, but it is hard to know exactly how long it will take. A couple other scheduling ideas: I will take pages that are all or mostly starred and schedule them normally, but we work until our time is up and will leave the rest for later review. (unless they are really fun and the kids beg to finish ;) Also, I spread the word problems out so we will do 1 page of word problems and 1 "regular" page when we get there instead of all the word problems at once.

[Farrar]

Yes, I'm just beginning to realize this about the word problems and we are skipping back and forth to do them now, which is better, I think.

 

Can you schedule a sort of check in instead? As in, there are three chapters per book. If everything took the same amount of time (which it won't) then figure out when you should finish each one in order to be done in time for the year. Then just have that on your calendar to look at it. It's halfway through the year, are we done with chapter 6 yet? If not, we maybe need to give a little extra time to math for a few weeks. Of course, that probably is too loose for some people, but that's how I tend to do things.

[Soror]

I scheduled mostly by time as well. I could sometimes look ahead a few weeks or so and give a rough guess but not always. The difficulty level varies widely and also the problems are so different as well it is difficult to determine how much time and effort they will require.

[UrbanSue]

We also just do time. Generally about 45 minutes/day though sometimes if we are in a guide section he wants to go longer. For further accountability, divide your year into quarters and shoot to finish one section each. But sections take really different times. We blasted through the first, slogged through skip counting, snd are now moving quickly again at the end of 3A. Maybe all the books average out like that, though.

[fourisenough]

It is really hard to say. We're about finished with 3D. 3A seemed to drag for us, but the other books were quicker. Not sure if that can be generalized to other kids' experience, or if it is specific to my daughter. Over the course of the last school year (since September 2012), we were able to complete all of: BA 3A, 3B, 3C, CWP 3, and MM 3B & 4A. We're currently wrapping up BA 3D and and will move into MM 4B for the rest of the summer. We do math for about 60 minutes per day, five days per week (on average), year-round.

[sleeplessnights]

I try to finish a section in about 3 weeks. I believe that comes out to about 2 pages in the practice book per day.

[nov05mama]

I've also found it nearly impossible to 'schedule' - I count on DS doing at least 2 pages each day, but it really depends on the pages. Some days he will ONLY do the 2 pages, and other days he'll do more. If you wanted to stretch it out, you could go as far as doing only a single page each day, which would allow you to plan more easily.

[FlyingMOm]

Thanks so much for all the replies- I couldn't figure out if I had missed something or if it really was difficult to schedule. I'll take your advice to shoot for one level per quarter without worrying to much about # of pages per week.