Wheres Toto Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 One last (hopefully) question about MM. I looked through every post with MM in the title and didn't see this addressed so maybe I'm just a weirdo to think of it. ;) When doing the MM full curriculum, do you complete one Chapter at a time before doing the next one? So, you complete Addition, then stop Addition to do Time, then switch to Money when Time is completed, etc.? I guess the same thing could apply to the topic books - do you do one a time? Right now we are doing MEP, about one lesson a day 4 x a week. In addition (because of ds asking for it) we do a couple pages or a game each day in Addition/Subtraction, Money and Time. Does anyone use MM mixing up the Chapters/Topics? Or does it really work best doing one topic at a time, then switching to the next? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siloam Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 Some kids do better with a mastery approach, and some need lots of review. If you know your kids need the review, then I would just find something else. There are so many math programs out there that you should be able to fine a low cost alternative, without having to do all the work of mixing up MM. Heather Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Create Your Ritual Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 (edited) We have been using MM along with MEP and the worksheet generated pages. For 4th grade I lay out each week so that dd9 is completing 2 pages of MM (in the order the Blue Series goes in), along with either one page of MEP or one math generated page per day M-F. I also will throw in mutip. mosaics and fun math on occasion in exchange for the math generated page. If I see that she are working solely on a Time chapter, I will make sure that she stays well versed in her math facts by bringing the other facts in using the worksheet generator. Three days a week we also do a page in SM IP Level 4 workbook. I basically do the same thing for ds7 who has just started MM2A, except he moves rather quickly so I have him complete 4 pages per day (2 MM pages in the order given, plus a worksheet generated page and an MEP Level 2A page). I also do the cumulative reviews at the end of each chapter before the chapter test. Edited January 16, 2011 by SaDonna Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TracyP Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 I would imagine most people just go on to the next chapter. That is what we do for the most part. The one exception has been with time. DD was having a hard time with 'quarter past' and 'quarter til'. I wasn't going to let that hold us up forever so I continued on but have been giving her just one time sheet each week to keep working on that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Veritaserum Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 We use MM Light Blue. Later chapters within a level tend to build on skills taught in earlier chapters. We complete each chapter and then do the next one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TracyP Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 Some kids do better with a mastery approach, and some need lots of review. If you know your kids need the review, then I would just find something else. There are so many math programs out there that you should be able to fine a low cost alternative, without having to do all the work of mixing up MM. Heather :iagree:If you are asking because you want to make it a spiral program it would be possible but way more work than I think is worthwhile. It is very easy to add in review from past chapters (make new worksheets, use tests as review, use cumulative reviews) if you think that would be enough. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPan Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 We're doing it across the chapters, but I'm not sure that's advisable for every kid. In our case it works for us. It keeps things from being too heavy and all one thing or another. I think the others' caution is correct that you could run into some assumptions of material being understood from prior lessons. I don't try to coordinate things at all or make things end at lessons are anything. I just pull the first page from each of the chapters and staple them together in her daily work. Repeat for day 2. And so on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hmschooling Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 I mix it up for variety. We might do a page of addition then a page of money and/or geometry, for instance. We do, however, go through foundational chapters in order. Addition, multiplication, etc. But, feel free to do as the author encourages and use the other topics however you please. It's so super simple to mix it up! Plus, it keeps the kids from being bogged by the primarily mastery approach. I put the pages in binders with tabs to separate the chapters, then mark off pages as complete in the TOC for each chapter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HappyGrace Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 I do pretty much the same as OhElizabeth. Dc would rebel if they had to do ten pages in a row on the same topic! So I tend to move forward in two chapters at once, one page from each per day. Sometimes, if it is math fact pages, I will even be moving forward in three chapters at a time. Dd is in 4A (which is all review for her but I want her to nail down the conceptual) and ds is in 2A. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wheres Toto Posted January 16, 2011 Author Share Posted January 16, 2011 Thank you for the responses. I'm not really worried about turning it into a spiral program, at least not in the sense of having constant review. We've done a few of the sample pages from MM and we both like how it's presented and how it works. I'm really just thinking of the fact that he wants to learn how to add/subtract and tell time and count money, and he wants to learn them all RIGHT NOW. Since our current method of doing a game and/or worksheet for each of them every day, in addition to our regular MEP, is working well for him I'm not sure how he'd react to all of a sudden just doing one thing for days (weeks?) at a time. I think I may order the Light Blue 1A and B (since I can use them again for my dd), go through topics he knows quickly to get him used to how MM "thinks", continue his Time and Money activities (since those are the ones he's most interested in and can easily be reinforced/reviewed through life once learned), do MEP for fun maybe once a week and see how it goes. Once he can tell time and count money, he may not be as impatient to learn everything at once. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wheres Toto Posted January 16, 2011 Author Share Posted January 16, 2011 I mix it up for variety. We might do a page of addition then a page of money and/or geometry, for instance. We do, however, go through foundational chapters in order. Addition, multiplication, etc. But, feel free to do as the author encourages and use the other topics however you please. It's so super simple to mix it up! Plus, it keeps the kids from being bogged by the primarily mastery approach. I put the pages in binders with tabs to separate the chapters, then mark off pages as complete in the TOC for each chapter. This seems like a good plan that might work if ds continues to prefer variety. Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChandlerMom Posted January 16, 2011 Share Posted January 16, 2011 Thank you for the responses. I'm not really worried about turning it into a spiral program, at least not in the sense of having constant review. We've done a few of the sample pages from MM and we both like how it's presented and how it works. I'm really just thinking of the fact that he wants to learn how to add/subtract and tell time and count money, and he wants to learn them all RIGHT NOW. Since our current method of doing a game and/or worksheet for each of them every day, in addition to our regular MEP, is working well for him I'm not sure how he'd react to all of a sudden just doing one thing for days (weeks?) at a time. I think I may order the Light Blue 1A and B (since I can use them again for my dd), go through topics he knows quickly to get him used to how MM "thinks", continue his Time and Money activities (since those are the ones he's most interested in and can easily be reinforced/reviewed through life once learned), do MEP for fun maybe once a week and see how it goes. Once he can tell time and count money, he may not be as impatient to learn everything at once. DD started in a different mastery math program, and she was like your son MORE MATH NOW. But you can't really do 8 pages of addition -- it takes time to sink in. So I just had her working in 3 or 4 chapters simultaneously. Math is NOT linear, so it's no big deal to work in addition and time and geometry and....In fact, I personally think it is a better way to learn math! A side effect was by the end of K she'd completed both 1st and 2nd grade math and in 1st grade was halfway thru 4th grade. Since I don't want to be teaching calculus to a 10 yo (nad I don't think she'd be developmentally ready anyways), this year I've gotten her doing more depth and breath (thinking about math in different ways; puzzles; algebra) instead of marching forward as fast. :D One of the reasons I chose MM is that I felt it would be trivially easy for me to shuffle the topics to suit us. In fact, I think it is a lot easier to adjust the pace in each section since there isn't a set "lesson" to do, you just work until you stop, then pick up where you left off the next day. Easy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Capt_Uhura Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 I mix up the chapters but my DS is in MM5A and it's really going a bit deeper in stuff he already knows. I'm doing this primarily to compact it. So we might do 2 pages in chapter 3 and do 2 pages in chapter 5. This has worked well for the graphing chapters at the very end b/c it doesn't depend on any work that has gone on before. Once we got into newer stuff, we just started going linearly again. I have tabs in place. Some tabs are for pages we didn't complete b/c I wanted to have them available for review at a later date. I believe Ms. Miller said kids don't have to do every problem on a page, to save some for review. It would certainly be easier if the review was built in but with my tabs, it wasn't that hard to keep track of. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stripe Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 I definitely think you should mix. It would not be useful to do a bunch of subtraction of 3-0 and 2-1 if your child can do addition to 20; the review would be too late to be very useful! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Robyn Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 (edited) When we're using the light blue series we just go through the pages in order. I tend to use the light blue series through the summer as just something to keep them from forgetting it all. When we're using the blue series we mix and match. I tend to use the blue series as a concentrated study to supplement our spiral math curriculum. ETA: Mix and match isn't necessarily a good term. Rather than mixing and matching, we may be using more than one blue book at a time. Edited January 17, 2011 by crstarlette Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corraleno Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 I think if you're talking about mixing in pages from the supplementary topics (time, money, geometry) then it's fine to mix some of those pages in with addition, subtraction, etc., but I wouldn't mess with the order of the "regular" math lessons. IOW, I wouldn't start mixing division pages in with beginning multiplication, or mixing decimal pages in with the fractions pages, because the lessons are written in such a way that each lesson builds on the previous one. Jackie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wheres Toto Posted January 17, 2011 Author Share Posted January 17, 2011 Thank you everyone. I feel much better about being able to work with MM if he continues to like mixing things up. He likes the format of the individual pages, I was just worried about how hard it would be to jump around. I probably won't jump around within a topic (definitely not for stuff like addition/subtraction) to make it easier to keep track. I was thinking more doing some of the Geometry, Place Value, Measuring, etc. mixed among the Addition/Subtraction, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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