Dreambox has a monthly fee, but it's terrific for developing good number sense and mental math skills. (And fun, too.)

Oh my goodness, it sounds like you have a child who REALLY thinks ahead! Thanks so much for taking the time to post this--it totally made my day. That's wonderful that she enjoyed it so much. In the works, but it will still be a while... Yes, the $200(!) price on Amazon is my self-published version that is now out-of-print. Well-Trained Mind is publishing a new edition, with a lovely professional layout and way more adorable cover than I was able to put together on my home laptop. (The Amazon page is here. Amazon is projecting it to be available January 3rd, and you can watch the forums to see when WTM has it in stock on their website.) Subtraction Facts will also be coming out in January, with Amazon expecting to have it available January 31.

I highly recommend going in order. For the most part, the chapters build on each other very elegantly: skip-counting from chapter 2 is used to find areas in chapter 3, which is then formalized as multiplication in chapter 4, which is used to go in-depth with perfect squares in chapter 5, and on and on. However, like Bolt said, chapter 1 is a big exception to this! It's crazy hard, and fine to save for when you need a break from all the multiplication sometime in chapters 2-5.

For equivalent fractions, try using simple hand drawn squares. Use vertical lines to subdivide the square to match the denominator of the simplest-form fraction, and shade the rectangles you make to match the numerator. Then, use horizontal lines to divide the square to match the denominator of the other fraction. The beauty of cutting squares like this is that it helps show why we multiply both the numerator and denominator by the same number to find equivalent fractions: the shaded rectangles (which represent the numerator) and the total number of rectangles (which represent the denominator) are being cut by the same lines, so they increase by the same factor. Here's a quick sketch I did to illustrate. Hope it makes sense!

Five is definitely too early to worry. It can be crazy-making when you feel like you've gone over the same thing over and over and over, but it's very developmentally appropriate for kids to struggle with reversals for quite a while. Their spatial sense just isn't quite developed enough to always get them straight. My son took until he was 8 to consistently get all of his letters and numbers correct, and my almost-six-year-old is still working on it. Here's a blog post I wrote on it with a few tips (Help! My Kid's Numbers are Backwards), but my main advice is to make sure your child has an alphabet and number strip always visible at her table so that she can look at it whenever she needs it. It will help imprint the correct "picture" of the letters and numbers in her brain--and keep you from always having to be the reversal cop.

I've been mulling over some of the same considerations as I try to figure out what to do with my 4th grader for Latin next year. He tends to happier with whole-to-parts curricula--but he often underestimates how important all of those "parts" are. So, I've been trying to figure out a Latin path that will keep him reasonably engaged and interested but still give him a thorough knowledge of the grammar. I'm sold on the idea that it's important to master the grammar--but I know it needs to be fun and interesting enough to keep us going through the whole grammar. We did Getting Started with Latin this year, and it was a perfect intro since it never overwhelmed him with too much memorization at once. The daily exercises gave plenty of context to see the point of the declension or conjugation that he was learning, and the constant review allowed him to truly master the 1st and 2nd declension and 1st conjugation. Now, I've decided to go with Memoria Press' 3-year Henle I program as our main program, along with reading Lingua Latina once a week. What I like about Henle is that it focuses on grammar mastery and introduces only a limited vocabulary (like FFL) but provides passages and sentences for translating right off the bat. We'll still focus on the same grammar as if we were doing FFL1 (noun declensions and adjectives), but the exercises feel like a better balance between drill and translation.We'll read Lingua Latina once a week (or rather, listen to the author read it to us) and discuss the questions in the Pensum to keep Latin interesting and work on the direct reading skills. I expect this will be very informal, and that we won't get through too much of it, but it should be a nice counterbalance to Henle. Wish I had some btdt advice for you, but this is what I've got! :) I'll be curious to hear what you decide to go with.

Binary's apparently very useful for understanding programming (according to my techie husband--I don't know much about programming myself). But it's certainly not an essential 4th grade math topic, so don't sweat it if it's stressing out you and your ds . :) If you want to give it one more go, I think the most helpful tip is to start on the "left" of the binary number when you're converting base-ten to binary. But, start on the "right" of the binary number when you're converting binary to base-ten. So, looking at p. 94, to convert 101 to binary, you start on the right side of the number (the lower place-value): "Okay, I have 1 one, no 2s, and 1 4. So, that's 5." This is a lot like adding up the expanded form of a number (such as thinking of 364 as 300+60+4), but each digit stands for one of the powers of 2 rather than our usual multiples of a power of 10. But, when you convert base-ten to binary, you start on the left side of the number (with the higher place-value). So, on page 95, to convert 50 to binary: "No 64s fit into 50. I'll put a 0 in the 64s spot. One 32 fits, so I'll put a 1 in the 32s spot. Now I have 18 left to account for. So, I can fit one more 16 in, and one 2 to use up the rest of the number." So, the answer is 110010 (since we drop the initial 0 for the 64s place). It's kind of like the repeated subtraction we do in the long-division algorithm, but you're always subtracting powers of 2. Clear as mud? ;) Truly, not a big deal if you skip this one.

Another vote for a GSWL Level 2 here! I'm in the same boat as the OP: rising fourth-grader, finished GSWL, love the short lessons, and enjoy learning along with my son. I've hemmed and hawed for the past month and finally decided to do Henle with the Memoria Press First Year Henle guide. It feels a little crazy to be doing such a dry, academic program with a fourth grader, but I'm hoping to use it in the same style as GSWL: short, ten-minute, conversational lessons each day, learning each declension piece by piece and gradually adding words to his Latin vocabulary. I love Lingua Latina (and used it for self-study a couple of years ago), but I think it wouldn't be sequential enough for my son. He's really thrived on learning the grammar bit by bit in GSWL, so LL didn't feel like the right fit for our main curriculum. I'm planning to use it as a reading supplement every few weeks, when we need a little variety or my son needs some time for the grammar to sink in.

Oops, I was just working with my daughter and realized that Book 4 is the one with the syllabification rules! Sorry for the mistake!

I agree, AAR would be overkill. The one thing to watch out for is how well he's doing with decoding unfamiliar big words. A lot of kids hit a wall with multi-syllable words right around the 4th-grade level and still need some explicit phonics instruction to make sure they get past it. Explode the Code workbooks are a thorough, inexpensive phonics curriculum you could use to make sure your son masters these skills. (If you went with them, you'd probably want to start him in Book 5 for practice with syllabification rules.)

I'd definitely recommend Math Mammoth over Rod and Staff for the solid conceptual foundation it lays for kids. (Here's my full review of it if you'd like more details on what I like about it. )

I think you'd be fine with either continuing with Horizons or moving over to CLE, as long as she can handle the amount of writing in whichever program you go with. (CLE 1st grade could be a lot for a K-er.) It sounds like she's a workbook-y kind of kid, but if she starts to get burnt out on the quantity of writing, definitely cut back or do the pages orally instead.

I can't promise a whole series...but how about an episode with Pam Barnhill at Your Morning Basket coming out next Tuesday? :)

:iagree: Also, just wanted to say that I hope you're not beating yourself up for making a choice that didn't work originally. It sounds like you've figured out what works better now and made a success of it, so pat yourself on the back. :) Homeschooling well sometimes requires some failed experiments. (Ask me how I know!)

Perhaps he's not quite understanding the why behind the how? For a lot of kids, the procedures just slip away from them when they don't have a strong idea of why the procedures work. CLE has some real strengths--I personally adore the language arts books--but conceptual math teaching isn't one of them. The bite-size introduction of the new topics can make it hard for big-picture kids to see how it all fits together. Using Khan to help him understand the concepts behind the procedures he's been learning sounds like a great plan. The Key to Decimal books and Key to Fractions books are other good books for helping kids develop a solid understanding of those concepts. Using some manipulatives could be helpful, too. If you have base-ten blocks, using the 100-flat as 1, the 10-rod as a tenth, and the unit cubes as hundredths are great for helping kids develop decimal number sense and understand why the procedures for the operations work.

Yes! So relieved that they've been able to stick to the published production schedule so that my son will be able to use the full series next year. And here's this, from the announcement email: "Stay tuned for the rest of the series and for Beast Academy Online, coming in 2017."

:grouphug: Hang in there. Explaining the same thing over and over is no fun at all. What kinds of problems is he getting wrong over and over? It might give us a better sense of what's going on if you shared a few examples.

I've added the topical Math Mammoth worktexts (the Blue series, not the Light Blue) occasionally to Beast. They're great because they only cost about $5 per topic, and you can buy and print exactly what you need. Also, Kumon drill books are cheap and easy if you want to add any basic skills review. My son has done Kumon's third-grade multiplication and third-grade division to reinforce those skills and build some automaticity. He doesn't love them--they're so much less fun than Beast!--but a page a day gets the job done pretty painlessly. :)

Both are strong programs, so no need to worry that your kids are missing out, regardless of which one you use. That said, one of the biggest differences between the two is the amount of guidance that they provide the teacher. If you're not strong in math yourself, Singapore is probably a better choice in the long run, because the Home Instructor Guides will guide you step-by-step as you teach the concepts. Math Mammoth provides a little guidance at the beginning of each chapter, but it's really up to the parent to figure out how to implement. (I've written reviews of both here, if you'd like a more in-depth analysis of them.)

There's lots of good advice up-thread, but one more thought: Part of what makes Singapore's presentation of the long-division algorithm so challenging is that the program moves very quickly from reviewing the concept of division in real-life situations to using place-value disks (disks with 1, 10, and 100 on them) to learn the long division algorithm. As a result, there's a loss of context and meaning as kids start to learn the algorithm. The place-value disks help to make the algorithm more concrete and hands-on, but they don't help much with making the algorithm more comprehensible and connected to anything in the real world. My son struggled with this recently as he was working through long division, and I found that using Monopoly money helped him to make sense of the algorithm. When 528 divided by 5 is framed as $528 divided up among 5 kids, the algorithm makes a lot of sense ("Let's start by doling out 1 hundred dollar bill to each kid.") If anyone would like more specifics on how to do this, I made a quick video a couple weeks ago that demonstrates it step-by-step.

Yes, exactly. Any set of steps that you can repeat over and over to get a certain outcome is an algorithm. There's a "standard" set that we use in the US for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but there are other algorithms for those operations that get the correct answer, too. (

No, no need to panic! The first long division section in 3A only has children dividing by 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the second section has them dividing by 6, 7, 8, and 9 (along with review of those facts).

My five-year-old daughter looooves Uno, Go Fish, and Memory. She's also a fan of GameWright's card games, like Slamwich, Rat-a-Tat-Cat, and Sleeping Queens.

Ooh, I'm a big fan of Konmari. I did a big declutter last summer and it was GLORIOUS. (Although we still seem to have a lot of stuff...) The amount that you're thinking about getting rid of sounds about right to me, but I'd keep the base-ten blocks. They might prove to be handy for place-value concepts for either Singapore, Horizons, or Beast. (But if you really want to simplify, take a look at the Minimalist Math Manipulative Guide that I wrote recently.)

First of all, I'd say to make sure to pat her and yourself on the back for how far she's come! Feeling confident in math with a dyscalculia diagnosis is not small potatoes. Since your daughter isn't quite fluent in addition, subtraction, and multiplication, I think you're making a good call in spending some time shoring up those areas before heading into division. Division requires using all of those skills (along with good number sense for estimating). If she has to spend so much of her working memory on those operations, it'll be hard to have enough brain space left to learn division. RightStart is indeed a great program, but I see several potential drawbacks to simply switching her into the program. 1) A lot of the benefit from RightStart comes from starting with the foundational work on place value and mental math in levels A and B. But the program is very hard to accelerate (and very expensive), so you wouldn't want to go all the way back to B. 2) The spiral nature of RightStart would make it very hard to transition from a program as strictly mastery-oriented as MUS. RightStart develops so many topics along the way that if you put your daughter in D, she'd be missing a lot of the those pieces. Have you considered using RightStart's Activities for the AL Abacus (and worksheets) instead? It's a streamlined and simplified version of the curriculum, and it would give you a chance to revisit place-value, addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The MUS blocks are great, but using a different manipulative for a second pass through those topics would give her another way to think about them and help broaden (and hopefully solidify) her conceptual understanding.