Deniseibase
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Posts posted by Deniseibase
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If you really just want light & fun, and aren't too concerned about needing credit, I'd check out the BBC's Horrible Histories. You can find some of the videos on Youtube, and the Terry Deary Horrible Histories books are often available used. They are definitely below grade level for your son, but they are awful fun and would stick in his mind :-)
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LisaTheresa is correct, there are pretty much at least two sentences in every problem set once diagramming is introduced. HOWEVER - in the Grade 5 book, there's a (what seemed to me) fairly lengthy stretch where they HAVE introduced diagramming, but not MUCH diagramming, and I felt the sentences were not very varied in that initial stretch. However, once they start branching out, the variety is fine. Just letting you know so you don't look at that initial stretch and think, "Yuck, no variety" - it will improve! :)
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If they are C students, I'd have to say no, Saxon Algebra 2 in the summer months is probably not realistic. Saxon Algebra 2 is a tough course at normal speed - as a motivated and interested adult math learner who did mostly above 90% on Saxon Algebra 1, I found Saxon Algebra 2 to be considerably more difficult, and 'hit a wall' about halfway through it and had to back up & re-study a couple dozen lessons to get it down. I'm guessing the previous posters who did classes in a very short time frame are 'math people' who can grasp this stuff quickly - if your sons are C students, then I bet they are more 'non-math' people like me!! :D
Two suggestions - find out what curriculum the private school is using and see if they can work through that - it may be easier than Saxon. Or, get ANY math curriculum that seems like it has an easy Algebra II class, work through it, and plan on having your sons need more review and coaching even after the summer is over.
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Khan Academy is a website with math videos and related exercises - it's free and it offers a lot of tools that other math websites don't. Check it out here - http://www.khanacademy.org
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If you've been doing the traditional Saxon and he's struggling with algebra concepts, I would NOT go on to Saxon Geometry - there is very little review of algebra in the geometry book, so all you'll be doing is giving him a year's 'gap' in which to forget everything he ever knew about algebra before going into the Algebra 2 book - and the previous poster is right, Saxon Algebra 2 is difficult. It does have some review, but even the review material 'kicks it up a notch'. I personally, as an adult math learner, hit a wall about halfway through Saxon Algebra 2 and had to go back, re-learn some concepts, and get myself more practice before I could move forward.
And yes, your teacher friend is probably right - I tutor public school kids in my area, and the public school math program is considerably less challenging than Saxon.
I would suggest summer review for your son. Would he do something like Khan Academy, or the Key to Algebra workbooks? Either of those would provide a good amount of basic review so he doesn't forget over the summer. Or, you could have him work from Foerster's Algebra in the areas he or you feel he needs work on. If he's interested in any sort of a STEM career then I'd really urge you to look at Foerster's for a supplemental source of word problems anyway.
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I would really find out what the birthday child wants, and then respect that. My DD usually has no gift parties, and always has a different charity she wants people to donate to instead. She gets pretty upset (privately, to me, not in front of her friends) when people bring her gifts instead because a) she thinks that's money that could have gone to her cause instead, and b) she knows it makes the people who followed her wishes feel awkward. This year she told me that NEXT year she's not inviting back one child BECAUSE they always bring a gift and it makes her feel not respected.
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I'm considering using the R.E.A.L. Science series for my very science-oriented, hands-on little fella. But since there are only three books - life science, earth and space, and chemistry, what have people who have done this series gone on the use for physical science in fourth grade? Thanks!!
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nm - posted on the wrong board! :-(
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I just want to chime in to say, I expected this to give me awful choices after reading this thread, but in every category checked, there was at least one of the books we either are currently using or plan to use next year. But I & my DD are very textbook oriented, maybe that makes a difference?
Also, 'Pythagorean THEORY' made me laugh :D
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Well, the end of ALL the upper level Saxon books seem to pile on a lot of new stuff. As an adult math learner, I can tell you that the last 20 or so lessons have always been a bear for me to get through too! :) But, I have found that those 20 or so concepts at the end of the book will be gone over again in MUCH more detail in the beginning of the next book - in other words, the last 20 lessons are really just a 'preview'.
So, if that's the only issue she is having, I'd say don't worry about it. At most, you might have her do some Khan Academy exercises on the same topics if you want. It doesn't sounds like there are other issues than those last 20 or so lessons from your post, right? (always done great with it, test scores good, picks it up quickly, etc) So if she's getting frustrated that she's not mastering those 20 lessons right away, just let her know that she's not expected to - they are just touching on those topics lightly to introduce them now, they will be taught in the next book in more depth. Hope that helps! :)
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I was going to suggest Khan Academy as well. I think I would use it as a supplement, since I've often found that the videos assume that you are getting some other instruction or that you've seen specific previous videos.
But the problem sets are pretty neutral in tone, so they should be just as appropriate for a teen as for younger.
:iagree:
As soon as I read the original post, I thought Khan Academy - chances are that, if this boy is bright, at his age, he has probably picked up a certain amount of number sense just from daily activities. Khan Academy could be used to let him see what he already knows that he doesn't KNOW he knows, and it will go through elementary arithmetic pretty quickly. Use it to help pin down the areas where he needs instruction (the coaching feature can help with that!), and let him blow through the areas that he already knows, especially since you have limited time to get him up to speed - Khan only makes you do 8 problems in many early topics to be considered proficient, so if he already knows something, he can check that knowledge and move on in a matter of minutes. I think if you just tell him to start at the beginning with Khan and have something like BCM on hand to go further in depth with anything that he needs instruction with, you should be able to progress fairly quickly.
If he's bright and just has been educationally neglected, I'd steer clear of both little kid and remedial books as much as you can - he will go through the early grades of material so quickly that is would be quite expensive to buy all those levels, y'know? And the remedial books will mostly be designed for kids who need to move very slowly, won't they? So I would think that wouldn't work too well since you want to be able to get through as quickly as he can as still learn it thoroughly.
Good luck! Sounds like a tough situation - good for you for helping these kids out!!
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Ds compared the 3rd and 4th Algebra I editions on-line and really wants to use the 4th edition. Could you elaborate on the increased amount of teacher prep? This makes me nervous! (FWIW, Ds is a strong math student and only rarely requires me to explain a concept further than the text.)
Hi Heather! Well, I won't say that it's like the lower levels of Saxon where you just have to sit there with the student and explain everything!! :001_smile: But, there are some things that are simply NOT explained - I'm working through the book myself, I'm over halfway through, and there is nothing MAJOR missing, just little details that could be frustrating, like whether to include the median when calculating lower and upper quartiles for box-and-whisker plots. Everything I've been confused about so far, I've been able to figure out eventually, sometimes by reading between the lines and sometimes by comparing possible to the solutions manual. I get the impression that the teacher's manual has some support materials in it that are not in the homeschool package, and there are a few places - maybe 3 or 4 things so far - where it seems that would have been helpful. Plus I've found maybe a dozen errors in the solutions manual, so a student would need to have access to someone who knew enough math to be able to correct those.
That said, we're still going to guinea pig ourselves and use it :D I posted a long thing about it in this old thread - http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=313846 but the bottom line is, the method and material covered seem like they will work really well for MY kid. We did AoPS this year, and she did really well, but she really didn't like spending days at a time on the same topic & really wants to switch back to Saxon.
Hope that helps!
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If your student can easily summarize short passages, she should do fine. That's really the only necessary skill that should be solid before you start. Most 9th graders should have no problem.
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My DD memorized this Shel Silverstein poem at age 5, with a new baby brother in the house ;-) She also loved to insert a big fake burp at the appropriate moment!
Someone ate the baby it's rather sad to say
Someone ate the baby so she won't be out to play
We'll never hear her whiny cry
or have to feel if she is dry
We'll never hear her asking, "Why, why, why?"
Someone ate the baby
Someone ate the baby it's absolutely clear
Someone ate the baby 'cause the baby isn't here
We'll give away her toys and clothes
We'll never have to wipe her nose
Dad says, "That's the way it goes."
Someone ate the baby
Someone ate the baby, what a frightful thing to eat
Someone ate the baby, though she wasn't very sweet
It was a heartless thing to do
The policemen haven't got a clue
I simply can't imagine who would go and (burp) eat the baby
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I can't do quote within a quote, but in regards to your post -
- Kahn Academy is good for review, BUT it's very easy to go through and just work the algorithms - there is nothing that makes you show your work, and in fact, the system is set up to reward fast answers with special badges. We use it for mental math practice & it really DOES help with that, but it won't help you if going step by step and showing all work is an issue.
- the new Saxon Algebra I is a neat book, with more varied story problems and more conceptual explanations than the 'old' Saxon Algebra I, but requires a LOT of teacher prep, plus the solutions manual has errors. I wouldn't suggest it for a struggling student.
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My Father's Dragon, and the two sequels. Utterly charming books. There really isn't a lot for boys to bridge that gap between Easy Readers and beginning chapter books tho :-/
Maybe a little over his head, maybe not, but my DS age 6 has been a HUGE fan of the Geronimo Stilton books for about a year now. Geronimo is a mouse journalist and goes on a lot of adventures. Some ARE scary, but you can pretty much tell by the title - The Phantom of the Subway is a scary one, Field Trip to Niagara Falls is not - you get the picture. There are almost 50 books in the series now, so plenty of non-scary ones. Many are on audiobook, too, which is why we first picked them up, that's really helpful for my beginning reader.
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I'm only somewhat creative. My kids are NOT crafty at ALL - as in, "Oh, no, do we HAVE to do coloring/clay models/needlecraft/beads/you name it?" Plus, I work full-time. So, nope, very few crafts here! :D
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Fascinating! I wonder if you have a prototype or if they just discontinued it shortly after it was published. Would love to know the content. It's hard to imagine that anything more is needed after algebra 1 and before algebra 2' date=' but maybe it's just to reinforce the concepts more. Does it have geometry in it? How many lessons?[/quote']
I want to know too! Could you also tell us what topic is the first lesson, and the last lesson?
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Hake/Saxon Grammar. 15 minutes a day for us (we skip the writing portions as we use a separate program for writing), and it really works well.
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Some kids are just faster than others. My DD likes to work really fast - sometimes TOO fast and she makes mistakes :P But she didn't have any problem with Saxon Alg 1/2 being done in an hour. But I have heard a lot of other people say that Saxon starts taking longer and longer in the higher levels. If your son's 'natural homework speed' is not really fast, then yeah, I can see how it could take him a long. Sorry I don't have any advice, just wanted to let you know it sounds like a normal thing, some kids really do seem to slow down with Saxon in the upper levels.
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grr, sorry, my computer double posted :(
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I have both editions. I used the 3rd edition myself to re-learn algebra a few years ago, and am currently about halfway through the 4th edition for myself. Both are excellent choices (assuming the Saxon methodology works for you in the first place, which I'm guessing is a yes or why would you be asking :) ) I will be using the 4th edition for dd next year.
The 3rd edition is the traditional Saxon, the way John Saxon meant it to be. It is tried & tested & there are lots of products out there if you want DVDs or CD-ROMs to go with. Most homeschoolers will probably stay with the 3rd editions. If you want your student to work independently, I would DEFINITELY stick with 3rd edition.
The 4th edition is the basic Saxon methodology of varied lessons with mixed practice, but it covers some different topics. The geometry has been mostly taken out, but not entirely - there are still problems on basic perimeter, area, or volume in most problem sets. More problems covering probability topics & statistics have been added - pretty much every problem set includes a set of data that you need to make some sort of graph and calculate some figures for. In a typical problem set of 30 problems, there are about 20 problems directly related to algebra, and the other 10 are probability, number sequences, logic, geometry, or some other non-algebra topic.
What I like about 4th edition is the explanations are much better FOR ME than 3rd edition (I don't want to start an Edition Wars here! :) ). The 4th edition gives more of the 'bigger picture' than the 3rd edition's focus on 'here's how you do it'. There are always real-world application example for every new concept. New concepts are taught with a series of 4 or 5 examples - the first example often reminds the student of something they have studied before, or else covers the 'bare bones' basics of the new concept. The next few examples take the concept a little further each time, and the final example is the real-world application. The variety of problems is also expanded - there are the ordinary problems where you just make a calculation, but there are also problems where you have to write about why something works the way it does, or find an error in someone else's work and correct it AND explain what the student did wrong. Word problems are phrased in lots of different ways, so the student gets a lot of practice 'translating from English to Math', which is something that has been a complaint about Saxon in the past, that their word problems tended to be phrased similarly. It moves at a fairly fast pace - in fact, the public school editions of these books have a whole line of resources for special-needs students, called Saxon Adaptations, and I can see why, you couldn't simply take it slower for a struggling child with these. There is a LOT of material here. There are a number of problems that tell you to use a graphing calculator, but I have been able to do all of these by hand so far - there are several graphing calculator labs in the text that show you how to use the calculator too, but if you aren't using one you can skip those and won't miss anything.
What I DON'T like about the 4th edition is that it currently does not have a corrected solutions manual. There are mistakes in it - not everywhere, but I've found a dozen or so. Also, as much as I like the explanations, some things are NOT fully explained in the lessons - I suspect the text is meant to be used with the teacher's manual that would supply these details. It's not usually anything MAJOR - the example that springs to mind is box-and-whisker plots - there are a number of problems where they want you to draw a box-and-whisker plot twice, once with and once without the outlier. It never comes right out and says if you are supposed to re-calculate the median & quartiles when you change the upper extreme or not (you are not supposed to), I had to figure it out by looking at the solution manual (which again, is not entirely accurate). I assume that in a classroom, a student would get this information from a teacher. It requires a great deal more input from the teacher and a great deal more prepwork. Also, I miss the great vocabulary from the older style word problems with Saxon! :)
Despite the flaws, we are going to use 4th anyway because we like it. I like the explanations and the wider variety, and the greater intensity of the pace suits my DD - we did AoPS this year because last year she felt Saxon was moving too slow, but that discovery method just isn't her style. So for us, it's worth the extra prepwork for me to find & correct the problems in the solutions manual to be able to use the things we do like. But, I would not recommend it for anyone who doesn't want to go through the whole book first on their own before they teach it :)
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Oops, sorry, double post, my computer is acting up today :-(
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I just looked at the table of contents for Lial's Prealgebra: An Integrated Approach and fractions, decimals, and percents each have an entire chapter in that book. Is the book your kids are using radically different? Or can you be more specific about what kinds of problems they were having trouble with?
I have never heard of any prealgebra program that didn't cover percents, fractions, and decimals pretty thoroughly. As for your question about how to keep stuff sticking with them when they get into higher math, it gets incorporated into the higher math problems, same as basic arithmetic does. You'll have questions like 3x+5=14 and you'll also have questions like 3/4x+5/6=11/8 and 1.4x+4.5=7.8 and so on.
Does that help?
Geometry...which curriculum??
in High School and Self-Education Board
Posted
If you are planning on sticking with Saxon, why not just go on to Saxon Algebra II? If your son completed Algebra I on his own in 7th grade, then he clearly has the smarts to complete Saxon Advanced Mathematics, and the normal topics of a geometry course are covered by the time you finish the Advanced Math book.
The only drawback I see there is that Saxon Algebra II is a difficult book and he might not be able to do it all completely on his own. But, if you get one of the DVD sets that go with Saxon, he should be able to do it if he understands enough to know on his own when he has to back up and re-look at a concept.
If you really do want a separate geometry course, I believe Teaching Textbooks has a similar set-up, and is not overly difficult. Also, a lot of people use Jacobs Geometry with Saxon, it seems to be pretty popular. Saxon Geometry is probably the most like what he did last year, of course, but my understanding is that it is redundant if you are continuing with the Saxon sequence anyway. Life of Fred IS very popular, but it is about 180 degree difference from Saxon, I would strongly suggest you borrow a book of that series from your library or a friend before you spend the money on it if you are interested in that route. A lot of kids do both Saxon and Life of Fred, but my DD LOVES Saxon and HATED Life of Fred - so much depends on your child's learning style!