DD1 liked to work from the book alone & just come to me if there was something she didn't understand. I think the explanations in the book are good but concise. Have you tried using a different browser? I have problems with the samples loading in Chrome, but it works fine in Firefox.

Search for Mark Crilley on YouTube.

Yes, I think you could probably go straight in with 8H under those circumstances. Some of the exercises expect calculators to be used - they have a little calculator symbol at the side, and I remember a couple where they're told not to use a calculator. GCSE maths normally has 1 paper which allows calculators & 1 paper that is calculator free, so the books reflect that, but if you're aiming for IGCSE & prefer to use a calculator throughout I don't think it would cause any real problems.

There are different books for each level, so for example a bright student would use 7H, 8H, 9H. Within each book the exercises are marked as 'M' or 'E', with the later questions in 'E' exercises being designed to really get them thinking. It has given DD such a solid foundation that she already knows a good portion of the GCSE material & I'm heavily tweaking our GCSE textbook to give an appropriate amount of challenge.

For really good integrated maths textbooks you might be interested in Elmwood Press. Their KS3 material is tiered, so that for each year (year 7-9, which I believe corresponds to the US grades 6-8) there is a choice of higher, core & support levels, so you can place your child accordingly. We liked them so much that I've just bought book 8H for the second time after we misplaced our copy. You'll probably find be able to order them from bookdepository.co.uk who offer free worldwide shipping. I don't know which CGP books you've ordered, but most CGP materials are revision books sold to supplement in school courses.

Don't know why, but the algebra & geometry book of the series is 70% off on amazon.co.uk, so I'm going to find out if it's as good as it looks. DD won't be using it for a while, but I don't think you can have too many maths books. There's a description of the structure on the description for the grade 10 book for anyone else interested.

Your DD is very lucky to have you for a mum.

Some of the things that I've found helped with my children: Use a whiteboard Scribe for them use coloured pens for writing working out, perhaps different colour for each line, but I let them choose how they wanted to use them use squared paper - we bought books with 7mm squared paper for one & 5mm paper for the other DD who writes smaller. The squares are just the right size for one digit per square for my youngest we're now using an ipad mini so she can zoom in for PDFs and write or type her answers in. For working from a textbook she can take a photo of the question to paste it into a page for her answers. buying exercise books in bulk & telling them 'Look, we're not going to run out. Paper is not at a premium. You do not need to worry about wasting blank space. You can lay your work out neatly with white space all round, lines between questions, etc & we STILL won't run out of exercise books for years!"

In particular I'm looking at this one: Algebra and Geometry: Japanese Grade 11 (Mathematical World) but opinions welcome from anyone who's used any of the series. I'm thinking it looks like a fun intro & might make a good scenic detour between IGCSE & A level (which very roughly translates to between algebra 2 & calculus, if I'm understanding the American approach correctly)

You could try MEP. Since it's all available online as PDFs you could start right away. Year 7 (which is equivalent to DM book 1) upwards are written to the student with more instruction/explanation than the earlier years, although there are also materials for the teacher.

Thanks for the suggestion.

We're in England, so we have the same issue. At the moment I'm using AoPS Algebra to dip into alongside English textbooks (from Elmwood Press) I wish we could use more AoPS books, but buying them all to use as we work towards IGCSEs just isn't an affordable option. Perhaps we'll use one of them as a detour between IGCSE & A level. Ruth, when you talk about Cambridge exams, which level is that?

Joy Hakim's Story of Science series could be a good starting point, maybe? Or BFSU?

I'd do it as 100 x 4 + 25 x 4 - 2 x 4. I'm sure there are lots of other ways to group the numbers. And I agree about enjoying the process the most. :-)

Wow, that sounds horrid! :grouphug:

Because order of operations is a rule created by mathematicians, whilst the distributive property is a naturally occurring feature of mathematics. I have 2 children with brains wired the same way as your DS and it can be fascinating to observe what they can intuit.

I've been tweaking from day 1, since I can't find the maths book I planned to use with DD2. DD1 asked to switch back to WWS from Galore Park. And a wholesale tweaking in DD1's maths from discovering that the Elmwood Press books we used have already covered a fair chunk of the GCSE material.

Audio ninja Middle manager of justice Tiny scan - use camera to scan to pdf Pipiatum For Latin Free Flow PDF master PDF splicer Are the ones I remember using in the last day or so

Have you looked at MEP for material to supplement? It's very very good, covers K to calculus, and since it's free, you can try out & just use the bits you need with a huge bill.

We' on our 4th week, and it's going pretty well. My only real problem is not being able to find the Elmwood Press maths text that I planned to use, so whilst I'm continuing to hunt for it we're using MEP. DD2 is using an iPad mini to type everything, or write on PDFs and that is proving to be a fantastic investment. I'm trying out 6 weeks on, 1 off this year and although everything is going smoothly I'm also looking forward to that time off.

DD2 has dyspraxia, so handwriting is slow, painful & difficult to read, so we've just made the switch to working exclusively on the ipad mini. We use PDF Master & PDF Splicer, which have free versions to try out, for our MEP maths, and for subjects where I've used TInyscan to scan in a couple of pages at a time from a textbook. She types other written work into Pages, watches youtube on it (Chinese with Mike, Crash Course Science, and lots of others) Brain warmups like Flow Free, Finger Physics, Nintaii, Puzzle Agent, Om Nom, Rainbow Web, play board games like Risk without having to get all the pieces out, Pipiatum for Latin, read ebooks from the library via Overdrive. A couple of weeks ago we had a week of needing to take her sister to a camp each day, so we took the ipad with us & worked in the library, in the park, in the car whilst waiting for her, etc.

Posting so that I'll be reminded to come back & write a longer reply tomorrow - I spotted this just as I was about to shut down for the night.

If they can play munchkin, I'd be inclined to just go straight for the regular version. If you have an Ipad/ipodtouch/iphone there's an app version too.

We're using PDF Master. There's a free version you can try out. You might also want to try PDF Splicer for cutting out just the pages you want in longer PDFs.

For us the deciding factor was the camera. I was originally thinking of using it to take photographs on field trips, but we now also use it if I want to scan a couple of pages from a book to annotate, or workbook pages. On days away from home it's much more convenient to take our ipad mini than several textbooks, pens, pencils, etc.