So, I just bought MM, tell me how to use it...

[Irishmommy]

I've been using Saxon for years and have never loved it, my son has always hated it. So, I thought I'd try a mastry approach with him, but I'm not sure how much we "should" do each day. My son can streach out 5 problems for 45 minutes, so giving me a time segment for each day wouldn't be good. Can you tell me how much your 4th grader does including "warm up" type activity (like wrap-ups or flash cards)?

[prairie rose]

We use the light blue series, not the grade level series, but the way I do it is I look at how many actual teaching and workbook pages there are, not counting the front matter and the answer key at the end. Then I decide how long I want to spend ideally on the book and divide the number of workable pages by the number of days I want to spend. If I come up with some crazy big number of pages we would have to complete in a day, I consider whether or not the child in question can work at that pace and add days if necessary. On average, we do 4 - 5 pages a day but some days we've been known to only do 2 or 3 if the topic is particularly tough or do 8 - 10 pages if they are just whizzing through it. Some times the number pages I want us to do in a day makes us introduce only one page of a new topic, I just adjust for it and add the extra page to the next day.

 

We don't do flash cards around here for math. I let them play games for their facts. We are working hard on mastering multiplication facts. Timez Attack and Multiplication.com are my new best friends. The kids have one 20 minute session on the computer each day just for fact practice (something for them to do while I work with their siblings) and before they can spend their free time on the computer, they have to do one round of any math fact game of their choice. We also have the Right Start card games and some other mathy non-computer games.