How much time math a day

[visitor]

Dear all,

 

A question to all mothers with a accelerated math child or who loves math and want to do more. How much time do you spend on math . And which curriculums / books do you use?

 

Please tell us what you do and which age and grade level your child is working. 

 

DS complained that we are not doing lots of math and wants to do more............. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[regentrude]

As much as the kid wants and is capable of.

My DD often binged on math for 2-3 hours, but not daily. My DS did not have the concentration and focus; in the middle grades he could work for 45 minutes on math, after that I saw an increase in careless mistakes.

We used Art of Problem Solving.

[SanDiegoMom]

My ds does usually an hour to an hour 15 of math per day (fifth grade).  That doesn't include reading books about math and watching videos about math (another hour usually).  My dd, not math accelerated, is happy to stop after 45 min. (also fifth grade)

[Arcadia]

DS complained that we are not doing lots of math and wants to do more.............

That is why math and physics are the last subjects of the day for DS12 so other things don't get neglected. Math is his boredom buster since he is mentally stuck on physics at the moment. He is happy to do math until he is tired enough to sleep which means that sometimes he does math from 8pm to 1am since he wakes up around noon.

 

AoPS is his spine but we use whatever the library have as enrichment since this kid can read fiction and non-fiction for more than 8 hrs straight on weekends if we let him.

[RoundAbout]

Right now we usually do math for 1.5-2 hours a day, 6 days a week. My DS is 10 and technically a 4th grader. We are taking a break from AOPS Intro to Algebra (Chapter 11) to do Counting and Probability because of his interest. We also do the Intro Number Theory book a few times a week and he watches math lectures on the Great Courses. In addition I plan special unit topics on fun things like taxicab geometry, rational tangles, graph theory, digital logic, or other cool puzzles I find. I have a CS background so its pretty easy for me to feed his interest with discrete math topics. In addition he reads math books and works on his own problems for fun beyond this time.

Edited March 28, 2017 by RoundAbout

[visitor]

RoundAbout is Math and Mischief your blog? It looks really nice ...

 

 

 

[visitor]

That is why math and physics are the last subjects of the day for DS12 so other things don't get neglected. Math is his boredom buster since he is mentally stuck on physics at the moment. He is happy to do math until he is tired enough to sleep which means that sometimes he does math from 8pm to 1am since he wakes up around noon.

 

AoPS is his spine but we use whatever the library have as enrichment since this kid can read fiction and non-fiction for more than 8 hrs straight on weekends if we let him.

 

Thanks Arcadia great advice . I think to make Math and Science his last subject as well. 

 

Can you recommend me good non fiction math books. Do you feel that math reading books are a great enrichment ? DS loves to read as well. 

[visitor]

My ds does usually an hour to an hour 15 of math per day (fifth grade).  That doesn't include reading books about math and watching videos about math (another hour usually).  My dd, not math accelerated, is happy to stop after 45 min. (also fifth grade)

 

Thanks for sharing. Which math videos does your DS watch? 

[Arcadia]

Can you recommend me good non fiction math books. Do you feel that math reading books are a great enrichment ?

Math reading books satisfy my bookworm's need to read and enrich his math knowledge beyond what typical public school curriculum offers. I am a bookworm too and definitely benefited from reading math and science books outside of public schools curriculum.

 

Quark has a nice list here http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/320275-designing-a-non-traditional-math-course-for-a-math-loving-structure-hating-child/?p=3272174

 

YouTube channels we follow are

Numberphile https://m.youtube.com/#/user/numberphile

Computerphile https://m.youtube.com/#/user/Computerphile/videos

Standupmaths https://m.youtube.com/#/user/standupmaths

[Pegs]

DS is 7 (grade 1 or 2 here), and is about halfway through Beast Academy level 3.

 

He spends about 30 min/day on the practice book most days, and we spend up to an hour on games every day.

 

ETA: Prodigy! About half an hour a few times a week, in addition to the above.

Edited March 28, 2017 by Pegs

[Sarah0000]

My five year old TK son lately has been doing:

 

10 minutes Singapore 3 (4 problems from TB)

<5 minutes Process Skills 1 (4 problems)

<10 minutes Splash Math grade 3

15-20 minutes mental math games, like RS

30-120 minutes/week Life of Fred Goldfish or other living math books

0-180+ minutes Prodigy or other computer/tablet math games

[madteaparty]

DS is 7 (grade 1 or 2 here), and is about halfway through Beast Academy level 3.

 

He spends about 30 min/day on the practice book most days, and we spend up to an hour on games every day.

 

ETA: Prodigy! About half an hour a few times a week, in addition to the above.

Just wondering what games you use? Prodigy still too hard for my DD (almost 6).

[Pegs]

Just wondering what games you use? Prodigy still too hard for my DD (almost 6).

Mostly card games and board games, as well as games from BA, as they come up.

 

If you'd like to outline some of the skills you're working on with your DD, I'd be happy to offer more detailed descriptions of the games we found useful at a similar age/stage. :)

[Cake and Pi]

DS#1 is 9yo in 3rd grade and does Beast Academy about 30 minutes per day, but will sometimes work for up to an hour if he gets really into a problem.  I plan to increase his math time to 45 minutes for 4th grade.  He loves math and proclaims it his favorite subject, but would happily forgo all academics if he could build, draw, and fold paper all day.

 

DS#3 is 5yo in pre-k and does MEP and/or RightStart for roughly 15-20 minutes per day.  Sometimes he'll play a RS math game too for another 15ish minutes, but not particularly often.  Sometimes he picks living math books from the library to read.  He used to like to play Dragon Box games on his tablet (= extra math time), but now he pretty much only plays Minecraft.  He asks for extra math sometimes, and we just work on interesting problems.

 

Our average is a little under 3 lesson days per week this school year, but we miss a lot of school for medical and other reasons.  

[CadenceSophia]

Just wondering what games you use? Prodigy still too hard for my DD (almost 6).

Do you know about setting up lesson plans on prodigy? My 4 year old is really into it and I try to give him a lot of assignments on shapes and building numbers out of base 10 blocks. He's not really strong enough to let the system choose problems for him but he can still have a lot of fun :)

[4KookieKids]

My 7 yo does math 15-20 min most days but occasionally 45. He's in BA 3D and Singapore PM 4B right now. I'd let him do more if he wanted to though, but I have very little formal school that I require from my kids still (since they're all still so young). He also beat the entire dragonbox series earlier this year but spends an additional 10ish min going through it all again each day.

 

My 5 yo is still pre-K and does 10-15 min most day. She is in Singapore 2A right now and mostly done with dragonbox algebra 5+. I don't let her do much more, only bc she doesn't read well yet and gets lazy and sloppy after 10 minutes, so she can only do math *with* me, and I have three other kids to take care of.

 

But I'm a math person, so math just tends to come up in life. I spent breakfast today explaining to my kids what transcendental numbers are because they started a conversation about their favorite numbers...

[mom2vikha]

DD almost 11, does Jacobs ( almost done) for an hour, does Zacarro for 30 mins and started competition math for middle school about 30 mins a day. She does the Competition math book because she gets to think through it and make mistakes. Almost 2 hours. But we tend to finish Math in the morning and afternoon is allocated for all other subjects.

[madteaparty]

Mostly card games and board games, as well as games from BA, as they come up.

 

If you'd like to outline some of the skills you're working on with your DD, I'd be happy to offer more detailed descriptions of the games we found useful at a similar age/stage. :)

Hi, thanks. Basically we are working on very little because she is in school all day. But we are mired in the Singapore 1 addition and subtraction to 20, which she is bored with. Thinking of switching to MEP actually as i miss the the logic bits which are missing from Singapore. Except MEP is too hard and too easy at the same time (practicing writing number 6 while doing some question for which I have to look up answer ;)

[LEK]

My math kid is in 5th grade, she does an hour on average of formal math a day (approx half hour each of 2 different curricula) and then spends an additional hour or more on math games, math exploration and math reading most days. I require 30-45 minutes a day, anything more than that is entirely up to her.

[RoundAbout]

RoundAbout is Math and Mischief your blog? It looks really nice ...

 

 

Yes. Thanks! I had a lot of friends asking me about math stuff so decided to start blogging about it and have an Instagram that shows some of the fun things we do regularly.

[Guest]

In elementary school ages, about thirty minutes with me, discussing a new concept or an interesting problem. We used SM, POD, and some math club material. Many games along the way. Many scout activities such as codes, map amd compass, and knots. Would recommend cyberchase on pbs also.

Edited March 29, 2017 by Heigh Ho

[quark]

Thanks for linking my list Arcadia!

 

I followed regentrude's philosophy of consistency over the long term. With one only child who was homeschooling, there was no need to watch the clock but that was with my only kid. I assume it can get a lot more hairy with 4!

 

What I mean by consistency over the long term is that while we have taken days off of other subjects in order to focus on math (with the exception of reading widely and deeply), we have also taken days off of math (about a week at most though because mine loves math). It all balanced out over the years. I've shared before that our initial strategy, when attention span was lower, was to do math in strands of 2 or 3 and sometimes 4 a day:

• One strand was practice/ keeping skills sharp -- the only time in elementary that we actually stuck to some curricula
• One was living math style reading and discussion (the thread in my signature, the one Arcadia linked, lists some of the books we used)
• Another was anything to do with problem solving (puzzles, AoPS, online things we came across, a math challenge to think about every week or two)
• We also participated in math circles, attended math-themed talks when we could and watched lots of Singing Banana/ Numberphile/ Vi Hart and other audiovisual material on youtube and other places.
• The strands were about 30-45 minutes long each day (shorter in the K-1 years) and we usually managed 2 or 3 a day.

When it became clear that math made DS so happy, we followed a language immersion environment as much as we could, only, the language was math.

 

Once he hit geometry at age 9, my son spent hours on math (partly due to slower handwriting too). I stopped counting hours and scrambled instead to find time to get some science done. We unschooled languages, literature and history until (and while) he started dual enrollment at our community college at age 11. He is now a 14yo senior enrolled in an abstract algebra class at our state flagship uni, where he will probably attend full time this fall.

Edited March 29, 2017 by quark

[SanDiegoMom]

Thanks for sharing. Which math videos does your DS watch? 

 

Mostly ones that I picked up from recommendations here! Numpberphile, Vi hart, documentaries on or off Netflix (Between the Folds, Story of Maths, Secret Life of Numbers).  All the Mathcounts or AMC videos on Aops. 

[Pegs]

Hi, thanks. Basically we are working on very little because she is in school all day. But we are mired in the Singapore 1 addition and subtraction to 20, which she is bored with. Thinking of switching to MEP actually as i miss the the logic bits which are missing from Singapore. Except MEP is too hard and too easy at the same time (practicing writing number 6 while doing some question for which I have to look up answer ;)

 

I haven't actually used Singapore, but I understand that at this stage you'd be doing a lot of work with "fact families"? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

We didn't really use a curriculum until DS was ready for Beast Academy, but here are some ideas of the games we played instead:

 

Go to the Dump. Education Unboxed has a video here: http://www.educationunboxed.com/go-to-the-dump/ You can also play for numbers which sum to things other than ten, or allow the addition of more than two numbers at a time.

 

When that gets a bit tedious, Snap 10. Use all the cards 1 - 9 from a regular deck of playing cards. Play like snap, but instead of snapping pairs, you snap numbers which sum to 10. This one is great for fluency (if I don't say so myself!), because with every card placed down, the child has to know exactly which card to look out for next.

 

Addition WAR: ​For beginners, have each player draw two cards, and the player with the highest sum takes all four. After building some speed and fluency, each player can draw one card each, and the first to call out the sum takes both. The winner has the greatest number of cards in her plunder pile.

 

Chutes and ladders​ with two dice, not necessarily just the standard 6-sided variety. This makes a ridiculously boring game go much faster, and encourages both subitising and quick addition of two numbers. You can also use this to reinforce the fact family concepts you've seen in Singapore already: "What did I roll? Oh, a six and an eight? They sum to 14! So what's 14 - 8? That must be 6! And 14 - 6 must be 8." And then you can demonstrate different models of addition and see whether your DD picks up on them in her own calculations. "I'm at 34, and I want to move 14 places. 14 is 10 + 4, so if I move up 10, I'll be at 44. Then if I move up another 4 places, I'll be at 48! I can check this. 1, 2, 3, ..., 14. Yep! 48!"

​​Or, "I'm at 78, and I'm going to move up 7 places. What do I add to get to the next 10? I'll add 2 and get to 80. But I was supposed to be adding 7. Hmm. I have to add 5 more. Oh, that's easy! 80 + 5 is 85."

 

​We also played games from a book I have called "Math Games & Activities from Around the World". Claudia Zaslavsky. Things like Sishima, Nerenchi, Oware, Pong Hau K'i​.

 

And games from various other sources of inspiration: ​Nim, Don't make a triangle! (from Beast Academy), Sprouts, ​Paddocks.

 

​I hope you find something useful in all that! We still spend most of our daily maths time on games, because I've found that DS really thrives on them. :)

[madteaparty]

I haven't actually used Singapore, but I understand that at this stage you'd be doing a lot of work with "fact families"? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

We didn't really use a curriculum until DS was ready for Beast Academy, but here are some ideas of the games we played instead:

 

Go to the Dump. Education Unboxed has a video here: http://www.educationunboxed.com/go-to-the-dump/ You can also play for numbers which sum to things other than ten, or allow the addition of more than two numbers at a time.

 

When that gets a bit tedious, Snap 10. Use all the cards 1 - 9 from a regular deck of playing cards. Play like snap, but instead of snapping pairs, you snap numbers which sum to 10. This one is great for fluency (if I don't say so myself!), because with every card placed down, the child has to know exactly which card to look out for next.

 

Addition WAR: ​For beginners, have each player draw two cards, and the player with the highest sum takes all four. After building some speed and fluency, each player can draw one card each, and the first to call out the sum takes both. The winner has the greatest number of cards in her plunder pile.

 

Chutes and ladders​ with two dice, not necessarily just the standard 6-sided variety. This makes a ridiculously boring game go much faster, and encourages both subitising and quick addition of two numbers. You can also use this to reinforce the fact family concepts you've seen in Singapore already: "What did I roll? Oh, a six and an eight? They sum to 14! So what's 14 - 8? That must be 6! And 14 - 6 must be 8." And then you can demonstrate different models of addition and see whether your DD picks up on them in her own calculations. "I'm at 34, and I want to move 14 places. 14 is 10 + 4, so if I move up 10, I'll be at 44. Then if I move up another 4 places, I'll be at 48! I can check this. 1, 2, 3, ..., 14. Yep! 48!"

​​Or, "I'm at 78, and I'm going to move up 7 places. What do I add to get to the next 10? I'll add 2 and get to 80. But I was supposed to be adding 7. Hmm. I have to add 5 more. Oh, that's easy! 80 + 5 is 85."

 

​We also played games from a book I have called "Math Games & Activities from Around the World". Claudia Zaslavsky. Things like Sishima, Nerenchi, Oware, Pong Hau K'i​.

 

And games from various other sources of inspiration: ​Nim, Don't make a triangle! (from Beast Academy), Sprouts, ​Paddocks.

 

​I hope you find something useful in all that! We still spend most of our daily maths time on games, because I've found that DS really thrives on them. :)

Wow, thank you. Really appreciate this.

[Arcadia]

Chutes and ladders​ with two dice, not necessarily just the standard 6-sided variety.

We use the dice used for Dungeon and Dragons https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/08/19/istock_000000244878medium-d8eee4498a8e178795062febf72d45c1a5a263a1.jpg

 

Risk was good for getting math and world map in, especially for my DS11 who has a hard time with continents.

 

ETA:

My DS12 spends about half his summer playtime on math since around 3rd grade.

Edited March 30, 2017 by Arcadia

[Guest]

Pandemic is good fun. mine ended up sorting cards and figuring odds all as learning more cities. And Ticket to Ride is appealing to a lot of nongamers,so they can practice route efficiency and resource allocation....its actually half price at target here right now.