Making jumps of understanding over summer-adjust for fall?

[Dmmetler]

We had a couple of sections left of 3A when we broke for summer, and one reason why we took a break is that I figured DD needed to solidify her multiplication and division facts.

 

Well, all of a sudden, she's got it. Not only does she have the facts, but she can mentally and on paper handle long division and multiplication, and the multi-step, combined problems in the mental math section. She really has just plain mastered the concepts completely and totally, and she's doing them using strategies that SM teaches-she's just extrapolated those strategies to the next step before actually getting to it in the actual textbook. Looking ahead, the rest of 3A is truly redundant with what she's doing on her own, and, in fact, the problems that she was making up to entertain the grandma waiting at dance class last night, who kept telling DD how brilliant she was (pushing her even further into show-off mode) were about the same level as the challenge problems in the IP, as far as I can tell.

 

I'm wondering...would it be so bad to skip the rest of 3A, add the books to DD's "fun math" stack, and go on to the new concepts in 3B? I hate to start a new school year with "You've just spent 2 months teaching yourself to do this, so now I'm going to make you spend the next month going over it again, because that's what the book says to do", but I also hate to skip in SM since it's already so compact compared to other math programs, and since it's so additive.

[EKS]

When my son knew what was being taught in Singapore before it was taught (and this happened more and more as we went on in the series), I just had him do a few problems in the textbook and then we moved on. If he got it immediately but didn't actually know it before it was taught, then I just had him do the textbook problems and not the workbook.

[boscopup]

I either skim through a section (quickly go over it and assign just a few problems) or completely skip it when DS demonstrates full knowledge of it already. We're using MM, but we have SM IP and CWP as our "fun math", and I usually just let him do the same type of problems in those books later on, so he is still getting practice with them at some point, but we're more using it as review. He just doesn't need to do 3 pages of the problems if he already fully understands the concept. When we were in MM 2, we learned 2-digit addition/subtraction with regrouping in one chapter. Another chapter had 3-digit. DS demonstrated knowledge (via SM IP ;)) of 3-digit addition/subtraction, so I skipped that chapter in MM. He had taken his knowledge of 2-digit and applied the same concept to 3-digit (and beyond). No sense in spending a whole chapter on the topic! I just let that be part of his "fun math for review" while we moved on to other topics.

 

I think in the case of long division and such, you're going to be using those concepts in the math you do after that, so she'll be practicing those concepts all the time.

[Crimson Wife]

I'm going to be accelerating DD in math after she finishes her current book (Primary Math 5A). Looking through the topics in 5B-6B, she already knows pretty much all of them. So I decided to skip her to Discovering Math 1 combined with Horizons Pre-Algebra and try to spread that combo out over 2 years.

 

DD has been chomping at the bit to start algebra and I've been trying to slow her down by going deeper rather than faster. But I think at this point, I'd be doing her a disservice educationally to force her to go through 3 books that are basically just review for her.

[LittleIzumi]

Dd "gets" what we're doing this year, so we're working through the IP only right now.