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Foerster's Algebra & Trigonometry DVD's


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I'm not sure about this but I think that these are not out till the Fall. I believe they are the Chandler dvds that have been discussed here before but Kolbe is now making them available in their bookstore also. They often negotiate deals for the Kolbe registered families or just have them in stock so families can order everything in one place.

 

http://www.mathwithoutborders.com/

 

Mary

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We plan to start Foerster's Algebra II in August & this looks like a fabulous resource! We have the Thinkwell lectures, which my kids enjoy, but they aren't keyed to the Foerster's text, so would be more of a supplement.

I really appreciate your posting these links!

~Laura

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Laura, which Thinkwell Algebra course lines up with Foerster's Algebra II ? Is it the Intermediate Algebra course or College Algebra?

Thanks,

Nissi

 

Hi Nissi,

 

We tried to line up Thinkwells College Algebra (which is the level you would need) with Foerster's Al II and it was extremely difficult. The sequence is so different that it is very hard to try to match them up. I gave up on it. We wanted to try out the Thinkwell material and so we used Foerster for the first half of the year and THinkwell for the second half of the year. I like Foerster much better than Thinkwell....thinkwell is too repetitive in their problems and there were some technical issues as well for us (right answers being counted as wrong and wrong answers in the material on line) They were always great about resolving these problems, but it was still a pain in the neck.

 

Sorry to give a less than glowing feedback...but I thought you should know our experience.

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There's nothing like BTDT for those of us who are planning for next year!!

 

We were planning to use Thinkwell *lectures* (not the problems) as just a supplement to help my kids understand the concepts in Foerster's Alg II. My kids find Ed Burger entertaining. But I wasn't looking forward to trying to figure out which Thinkwell lectures would correspond to where we were in Foerster's -- which is why I was so excited when Michelle & Mary posted about these DVDs tied directly to Foerster's!

 

Nissi -- Sharon's right, it's the "College Algebra" you'd want from Thinkwell, if you're doing Foerster's Alg. II. We are just going to watch the lectures, not do the problems. You can watch the Thinkwell lectures for *all* their math courses for something like $26 a year at hotmath.com (which I also learned about on this board!!). I am sooo grateful to the posters on this board -- I almost bought the Thinkwell course for just College Algebra for *much* more than $26, and we'd have only a year's access to the course. We may very well end up taking more than 12 months to do Alg. II, as my boys are only 11 & 12 right now. We're in no rush, and the concepts keep getting more advanced :-)

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If you're lucky you can sometimes get thinkwell dvd's for a good price. I've paid $8.00 for Precalculus and $12.00 for Chem. Beware there is no cheap way to just add the web subscription, so if you want the test and website the cheapest way is to try homeschool buyer's coop or the acedemic superstore.

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Thank you, Laura and Sharon. Very helpful info. Sharon, did your dc. do Foerster's Alg.2 independently? Is it very thorough with explanations? My ds. did Foerster's Alg.1 independently with very little help from me. Is Alg. 2 also laid out as well to enable self study?

Thanks.

Nissi

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I've been really impressed with all his books. I think the explanations and the examples are really clearly laid out. Our ds pretty much worked through them on his own. I have tried to stay up with him to help when he needed it, but he has mostly figured it out all on his own.

 

I used the Teachers Ed. to figure out what to assign. I liked the way it told me how many days to spend on each thing, which problems were likely to be difficult and what pitfalls to watch out for.

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DS did Foerster's Alg I and II mostly on his own. (He is bogged down around trig right now.) We picked up a Teaching Company Algebra I and II set, which he watched one of, then ignored the rest, so I assume he didn't need the video.

 

I find the explanations clear and easy to understand, whenever he asks for help. I'm not sure how clear they are to him because I'm not convinced he even looks at them. Nor does he follow a schedule - he goes in bits and spurts, a relic of the block scheduling in his Waldorf grade school.

 

The teacher's edition would have been nice but all I had was a copy of the solutions manual.

 

We have an older edition so it doesn't include the graphing calculator - it has computer programming in basic :001_smile:, state of the art twenty years ago!

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Sharon do you know if the Teacher's edition schedules the Graphing Calculator supplement? Would a child pretty proficient at math that prefers to learn math on their own be able to do so w/out a video tutor?

 

That according to Paul Foerster. I had an email correspondence with him a couple years ago and he recommended that we use the Al II/trig book just for Al II and not for Trigonometry. He said not to buy the graphing calculator supplement because it is extremely outdated. He recommended to us that we wait to work on the graphing calculator stuff until the Precalculus with Trigonometry text that is published by Key Curriculum. It is up to date on the graphing calculator use, but it is also pretty tough, in my opinion, to learn. It is a powerful tool, but I could have really used a tutorial on it. We did learn how to do it, but it definitely required a bit of sweat equity!

 

We did not need any kind of video supplement. While I Like Ed Burger's materials alot, I don't think that they work well for Foerster because of the sequencing issues.

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