Jump to content

Menu

Math: Adjusting Beast?


Recommended Posts

Do any of you have a kid who enjoys Beast but wishes it moved more quickly or jumped around more? 

 

I started DS7 on BA3 at the end of last summer.  He made it halfway through C by Christmas, but he was dragging.  This spring we've been scheduling a handful of subjects at a time in six-week blocks; we've finally gotten back to Beast, and he's got mixed feelings.  He thinks it's fun, but he prefers the problems with visuals (or even a page full of straight-out number problems) and really groans at the full pages of word problems.  The other issue is that, since the problems are often challenging/time consuming, we get through only a couple pages a day (usually two single sides)...but then we're working on the same topic for two or three weeks (since we only school 3x per week), and he's tired of that topic and ready to move on after the first week.  Measurement hasn't been too bad because there are so many different forms of measurement, but he really got sick of division.  (I think that's why he likes Prodigy--it keeps moving to a new topic as soon as he's mastered the one he's on.)  He's super eager for me to order BA4, but he's always chomping at the bit for the next thing (in guitar, too, he NEEDS a new piece each week or he gets really discouraged/unenthusiastic; he'll gladly continue to work on the old song as long as he also has something new), and I'm not sure if his patience will hold out well for BA4 unless I skip portions (which I've taken to doing lately--let him pick half of the page to do--but then I worry he's not getting the benefit of the program). I guess I could try to jump around in the chapters, but I'm worried that's going to confuse me if not him.

 

Any suggestions/insights from those more experienced than I?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Am I weird that it never occurred to me to do Beast in order?

 

At least in 3, I've found that within each individual book we can totally mix and match. So we might do a toothpick problem from shapes, then a polyomino puzzle, then a couple skip counting problems, then approach one of the trickier area problems... I do insist that all of one workbook be done before moving on to the next, because that sometimes has prerequisite skills from earlier books, but she can do the workbook in any order, so that when she hits a frustrating section, she moves to something else for a while.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We did the AoPS series out of order. Even within the books, Ds likes to do the geometry problems when he is frustrated with the more algebra-ish ones.

 

Math is math. It is all linked and circular. Most of the time it is just arithmetic reworked in different ways.

 

I was big on talking with Ds so if he reached a point assumed knowledge was not there, we could fill in holes. In general, I don't think much of any of it has to be done in order. Public schools do it that way because it is easier to track and teach large volumes of students when there is ONE sequence and ONE way. Beast and AoPS are all about eliminating such thinking.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny, I was planning on mixing and matching and hopping around with DD this fall, but I don't feel like I can/should do that with DS; the only reason I plan to with DD is because she is so easily daunted and I'd like to pick things she'll enjoy that will also be slightly challenging to build up her tolerance for frustration.  DS enjoys math and I'm not supplementing (unless you count Prodigy), so I feel like he ought to do it all. 

 

Do you insist that every problem be completed?  I'm afraid if I turn him loose to pick and choose, he'll go through the entire book doing every problem type he likes, and then he's stuck with all the ones that don't look interesting.  (Like he does with dinner--and you know how long that one serving of whatever-he-doesn't-like can take...how much moreso for sixteen pages of undesirable problems for a kid with ADHD!?)  Having him go in order is the way I can ensure that he mixes problems he likes with those he doesn't like, so it's not feast-or-famine.  Maybe combining units would work for him, though, even though it totally doesn't work for me.  He happily reads chapters from two books each night, where that would drive me insane...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Random other question--should I worry if Prodigy has him working way ahead of Beast?  In Prodigy he's done quite a bit with long multiplication/division, converting/comparing/multiplying/dividing fractions, etc. that we haven't formally gotten to; I'm vaguely worried that he's figuring out how to do the problems without truly understanding what he's doing, and maybe that will ruin him forever.  (Do you notice a theme here?  Basically I'm convinced that something I do/don't do will mess my kids up for life; I'm just waiting to discover what that something is.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, jump around in Beast. No, don't worry about Prodigy.

 

My son is dragging through 4A right now. We have long periods of not touching BA and doing other stuff. And he's practically memorized all the 3 and 4 guides. The result being that he find the first few pages of each chapter boring, He's excited about working some topics and not others. And he's likely ADHD too, so a puzzle requiring multiple steps and sustained concentration will wipe him out. So I've started jumping around. "Okay, let's do this page of angles, and then you can work on the exponents again, okay?"

 

And he placed into 8th grade on prodigy. If you click on the "hint" in Prodigy it pulls up a full explanation and a worked example. No, there's not a lot of conceptual depth, but that's what BA is for. My son needs more practice with making calculations (that whole focusing thing) and Prodigy makes him do that without asking his to do "boring stuff I already know" so I'm cool with it. Plus, if the kid has good number sense and a good base in how math works, they might be able to figure out the concept on their own. My son spent some time wondering about the "rules" for multiplying two negative numbers, or negative or positive, and then the other day explained to me how and why the "rules" worked. So rote learning isn't all bad as long as there's already good math sense.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do require every problem in Beast. While she is allowed to bounce around all she wants within a book, I don't give her the next book until the current one is fully completed.

 

She supplements with different math games at different times, working on a crazy variety of things. She's fine. I think it helps her some to have a few of the plain procedural knowledge when she gets to tricky conceptual problems in Beast.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Now that I think about it, we don't always use Beast in order either.  We mostly do.  Every problem gets done eventually, and we've petty much stayed on problems from 1-2 chapters at a time, but I've rearranged a bit to suit our needs.

 

DS#1 did every problem in order for 3 and the first quarter of 4.  The long division chapter in 4B proved to be quite frustrating for him for a time while he worked out whatever strategy it is he uses to work the problems writing little to nothing down (he's dysgraphic).  So, for DS#1, I let him move on to the logic chapter while doing just one or two of the bigger division problems each day.  He did that chapter pretty fast -- I'm pretty sure he was still doing long division pages during the chapter after the logic chapter as well.

 

DS#2 gets bored easily if I keep him on the same topic for too long, and he has a pretty low threshold for frustration.  He can't usually spend an entire 30 minute math block doing BA problems without breaking down.  Right now I have him starting math time with a RightStart lesson, and then for the remaining time he does BA.  It works out so that he's usually only doing a page or two of BA each day, and he gets a nice array of topics in any given week.  

 

For both boys I've been taking the word problem pages out and giving them 1 to 3 problems (depending on difficulty and interest level) each day as part of their math "warm up" (a habit picked up with RS that will will continue indefinitely).  It's worked out so that they're usually doing the word problems for the previous chapter for the first half to three quarters of the next chapter.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The only worry I would haves out jumping around or skipping is that often each problem builds on the one before for the most part. They learn a trick or a skill that they use in the following problem. I've seen my daughter have a lot of aha moments because of that gradual buildup. But she is less intuitively mathy so she really needs every single problem.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...