Haven't posted in a long time, but trying to sell some books I no longer need and had trouble parting with for a long time.

I really appreciate all of your helpful comments. I am such a rule follower and sometimes that can be bad! I think I'm going to teach from the text. I will ditch the dvds for now and see what happens. Thanks again!

We used it in 6th grade and actually enjoyed it. This program is not riddled with obscure words and I think that makes the learning more enjoyable.

Calling Dana doesn't feel right for me. I'm really really good at math and have taught my ds 4 levels of Singapore. To have to call another teacher for help, when I totally know how to explain these concepts to my child, seems ridiculous. At the same time though, I feel like I'm "breaking the rules" by stepping in to teach because this is not how the program is designed. To be completely honest, I don't know if this aversion to calling Dana is an ego/control issue on my part when I know I could teach this OR is because I don't see the worth of a program that makes us dependent on someone else. (While we didn't take the placement test, I am so sure he is ready for this after finishing Singapore 6.) I'm guesssing it is ambitious of me to expect that my child has the maturity to recognize that he doesn't understand something and then go back to the text or dvd to work on the lost concept/problem. If this program wasn't so darn expensive and if people didn't rave about it, I might feel more confident about chucking it.

We started the prealgebra program this year but my child is doing terrible! I am following Dana Mosely's (the Chalkdust teacher) advice and I'm letting Dana do the teaching on the dvds, but my ds has gotten a 58 on his Unit 1 test and a 42 on Unit 2. We've done Singapore levels 3-6 prior to Chalkdust. Singapore required me to do all the teaching and that worked fine because I could catch everything my son was missing. As Dana suggests, my ds corrects his own work and when I ask him (ds) how he's doing with it he says fine (NOT!) This feels like a disaster (a very expensive one at that) and we have to go back and redo the first 30 lessons of math! Dana suggests calling him if your child gets lost in math but I'm wondering if this method of learning is just not a good match for my child. Any advice? Should I switch to a regular program like Saxon? Has anyone else had problems with this?

it makes checking my ds's work much faster. When I've tried to just glance over his work to make sure it's correct, I often have to take more time than I'd like checking it. The proofreading section sometimes trips me up for a few minutes when I can't find the last mistake. I want to devote as little time as possible to spelling to I use the teacher's book- it's faster (I'm impatient. Can you tell?)

When the accountant came with the envelope and blocked the 2 finalists from camera view, Adam moved into camera view pulling Kris along with him. I have a professional child actor who is well known. From being in this business I can tell you that many experienced performers would have stepped into the camera's view in that situation- but would not have pulled their competition along with them! That was a testament to Adam's genuine support for Kris. I commend them both for their respect and admiration of each other. That was awesome!!

Lightning Literature might fit your needs.

I think Kris won because he is an "All -American" kind of guy. If you compare them vocally, there's no match. Kris is talented and sweet. Adam is a born superstar. Adam will be the biggest star ever launched by American Idol. -My (very strong) opinion/prediction!

We used book A last summer. Will be using book B this summer.

If you do this: 7th-Pre-Algebra 8th-Algebra 1 9th-Geometry 10th-Algebra 2 etc. your child will be more prepared to take the SAT. In addition, this is what most kids applying to competitive schools will have on their transcript. Unfortunately the college admission process has become extremely competitive. (My older ds is a rising HS senior at a private school.) You are smart to think about your future goals and work your curriculum backwards from there.

Actually, after working with LOF, it was obvious that doing something in addition to Singapore was beneficial. After 5B we did LOF Fractions in the summer. If my ds got everything he needed from SM, he should have been able to "nail" LOF after only a short time of being introduced to the LOF style. He didn't. LOF serves as a great supplemental program to SM. I think it fills in gaps of understanding and/or computational skills that a child may not get from SM. Of course not every child would need this. (If my older ds was doing SM he would have flown through all of it by 4th grad.) The Bridge at the end of each LOF chapter was great. Even though it looks so simple with just 10 questions, getting less than a 90% on 3 Bridges in a row, would dictate that my ds had to keep doing the next ones until he got 3 A's in a row (that's how we did it.) He became determined to buckle down with focus and accuracy to answer the 10 "measly" questions. My ds was then able to nail most of the Singapore fraction problems (in 6A & B.) Now, after 6B, we are about to embark on LOF Decimals & Percents for the summer. I am confident that he will gain a better acumen of that topic after LOF. (Although SM is strong on conceptual understanding, I think he missed something in 6A & B with respect to his understanding of decimals and percents but I can't quite put my finger on it.) Even though we do supplement SM with their Extra Practice workbooks, Intensive Practice workbooks, and Challenging Word Problems, I still feel like we are missing something. We have found that Extra Practice books are nice but don't offer that much "extra." Intensive Practice sometimes seems too hard or even a bit off topic from what we were doing in the base program. Challenging Word Problems really only work well for my ds with the basic problems. Once we get into the challenging section, he is so consumed by the the difficulty of the concepts, that he gets discouraged and loses focus on the core of what he is learning. He has scored extremely high (98-99% nationally-can't remember exactly) on his standardized test in math. I was shocked because math is not his thing. I think SM is an excellent program and is quite advanced. It never hurts to check in with another curriculum because SM is so untraditional to its approach. I'd say that if your child is breezing through SM, he/she may not need a supplemental program. If your child is getting less than A's on the reviews and so on, I would try a supplement and see if anything can be gleaned from that.

We are not classiscal home schoolers and I found that (IMHO) the words in the word list for VCR were just too obscure. The words in Vocabulary Vine seemed to be more applicable to our studies.

My ds just needed more practice. He was still making a lot of careless errors in 5B, which have significantly decreased this past year in SM 6. I think he wouldn't have been ready for prealgebra at that point, but I can see a very bright child going from 5B to Chalkdust Prealgebra.

I would only use SM through 5B then switch to Chalkdust Basic Math. I didn't find a whole lot of benefit from doing Level 6 in SM. I think switching to Chalkdust for 6th grade would have given him a more well-rounded and traditional math education to supplement his already strong Singapore base.