Using Saxon Dive for different edition?

[Joy at Home]

Does anyone know how different the second and third editions for Saxon 8/7 are? I have the second edition DIVE, but third Edition book. I don't know if it's just the sequence that has changed or if the changes are more involved. I'd like to try to still use it so I don't have to buy the older edition, but don't know if it'll be a huge headache. Any thoughts?

 

thanks,

Lisa

[Sue G in PA]

Funny you should post this, Lisa, b/c I was just thinking about this last night. Check out the different chapters of the book and the DIVE b/c they will most probably mesh to some degree. I "think" that the newer 8/7 included more PreAlg., but I'm not certain.

[Carol in Cal.]

between the second and third editions--the revamping of Math 8/7.

 

8/7 used to be a sort of remedial arithmetic book that many skipped, and Algebra 1/2 was pre-algebra.

 

But for the third edition, 8/7 has pre-algebra incorporated throughout; so it's quite different from before. I suspect that the old DIVE won't serve you very well for this particular book.

 

Also, 8/7 really gave my DD a lot of trouble this year. It covers such a broad scope of material that it's hard to get your head around it. It was the first time that I thought that spiral didn't really serve her as well as mastery.

 

We plowed through it but it was very difficult. Every so often I would stop progress and just help DD consolidate all the material so far--especially about 4 functions with negative numbers, orders of operations, and combining strings of like and unlike terms. At one point we even stopped--she got up to lesson 111, and I realized that she really hadn't been learning the material, which was a much my fault as anyones--she had been correcting her work and then tell me which ones were wrong, so that we could go over them or she could do them over, but neglecting to mention that she was skipping some of them completely :rolleyes:, because she didn't really even know where to start. And she had been plowing forward without taking all the tests, because she wanted to get finished so badly, and I had allowed this because she said that she really, really knew the material. All in all, my failure--I should not have given her quite so much freedom. Anyway, I gave her the test that goes with 110, and after looking over the answer sheet in appalled horror, I backtracked through the material and finally decided that she had to retreat to about lesson 90 or 95 or so and start over from there.

 

This made for a far less pleasant summer than I had anticipated, but, oddly enough, did not drop her score on the CA STAR test (which tests against pretty much the whole of pre-algebra, so I was surprised that she did so well.)

 

We start Algebra 1 next week.

 

All this to say, 8/7 is the toughest, broadest, most complicated material so far and the only book that has really given DD any trouble. So based on our experience, this is the book for which you really need all the help you can get, and an old DIVE will probably be inadequate.

[Moni]

, 8/7 is the toughest, broadest, most complicated material .

 

The newest Math 87 is really a great text.

Wonderful.

 

It can require the kids to think, so it's usually their least favorite ;)

:seeya:

[Carol in Cal.]

The newest Math 87 is really a great text.

Wonderful.

 

It can require the kids to think, so it's usually their least favorite ;)

:seeya:

 

I think that the text would be MUCH better if it did what I ended up doing--stopping every so often to put all of the related material together, even though it had already been covered incrementally.

 

Also, I found that although the material was taught thoroughly, the problems didn't necessarily force kids to use the 'general case' methods. DD figured out some really cool shortcuts, which is great in that she was thinking mathematically, but then when the problems got harder, she had not really gotten the kind of practice that she needed to step up and do the tough ones. I found that I really needed to watch out for that, and if a non-mathy kid like mine had a non-mathy mother who was really relying on the DIVE only, things could get pretty ugly.

 

Example:

A is 40% of B. A is 100; what is B?

Instead of setting up a general case equation like: A = (0.4)(B), substituting for A, and solving for B, DD would say: If A is 100, then 10% of B is 25, and so 100% of B is 250.

Now, both approaches solve the problem, but DD's only works when the % is something simple like a multiple of 10. Once A is 37% of B, she can't do the math.

So I have to walk her through the general case rather than just look at whether she got the right answer. And, IMO, too many of the problems in 8/7 are too easy in that way, so they let you avoid learning the material.

 

Another example:

 

18 + 3X = 36--What is X?

 

The right, general way to do this is to subtract 18 from both sides of the equation. Then divide both sides by 3.

 

But DD looks at the equation, and right away she realizes that you have to add 18 to 18 to get 36, so that X must equal 6. That's fine, it's great, actually, except that when faced with a 'non-even' problem of this sort, she doesn't know to start by subtracting the first term from both sides of the equation.

 

Still the combo of Saxon 8/7, the DIVE, and me has been very effective. This isn't a book to just hand over to the child along with a DIVE, though, unlike some of the earlier ones.