placing for MEP?

[serendipitous journey]

... this is for Button (not the baby! :)). We continue to have a Very Emotional Relationship with Math-U-See, which has served Button well with its systematic, mastery method and clean pages but has its little oddities, and to my mind some glaring gaps (mental math being one). Most recently, I thought we'd start Epsilon (Fractions) to lighten things up a bit while we plow through the end of Delta (Multiple-Digit Division). But the initial Fraction presentation is ... challenging. Maybe horrid. At any rate, on our second day Button flipped his worksheet over, looked at the top set of problems, and burst into tears! (you can be sure we've backed off Epsilon for a bit :). I think I'll start working with the material on our own, 'cause he pretty much has the concepts, but the way they were presented was crazy counter-intuitive and hard to read, one of the problems with accelerating in MUS).

 

He hated Singapore when we tried it. I'm not sure if it was the actual presentation, or a problem with the placement; I accidentally placed him too low.

 

So I'm looking at MEP (and maybe giving Singapore another try, too). I think Button would place in Singapore 3A. He has complete (multiple-digit, with regrouping) addition, subtraction, multiplication and we're working on long division at the moment. He understands fractions and negative numbers but hasn't done much with them. Any ideas for MEP placement? I tend to be "conservative" and would place him at the second grade level, but after the problem with our Singapore venture being too easy thought the third grade would be better.

 

Whatever we do, we'll probably move along in MUS for a while as well; I'm just thinking a parallel program would be nice...

 

:bigear::bigear::bigear: and thanks!

[serendipitous journey]

well, color me chagrined. I hadn't realized that MEP is _free_, and comes in easily parsed chunks ... I can just print out bits here and there and place Button that way.

 

:blushing:

 

FYI, the first page of 3a had a pictorial version of

 

x+y+z=100

x+y-z= 60

x-y+z= 40

x-y-z = 0

 

and I'm sure Button's not ready for that. So my working plan is to start with 2a and zoom along. It looks like fun.

[quark]

It's been a few years but to tell you the honest truth from my experience, I wouldn't ignore Year 1 materials. Although my son was pretty advanced, Year 1 positively stumped him. Once he got a good handle of how MEP works though, he sped through it. We jumped to 1B sooner than I expected and within a year, we were working on Years 3 and 4. But the initial intro to Year 1 did wonders and I'm glad I took another mom's advice to try it first.

 

Good luck!

[serendipitous journey]

It's been a few years but to tell you the honest truth from my experience, I wouldn't ignore Year 1 materials. Although my son was pretty advanced, Year 1 positively stumped him. Once he got a good handle of how MEP works though, he sped through it. We jumped to 1B sooner than I expected and within a year, we were working on Years 3 and 4. But the initial intro to Year 1 did wonders and I'm glad I took another mom's advice to try it first.

 

Good luck!

 

Thank you for the suggestion, it honestly hadn't occurred to me to start with Year 1.

[quark]

Thank you for the suggestion, it honestly hadn't occurred to me to start with Year 1.

 

You are welcome. If you do decide to start at Year 1, I found that printing just every other day's worksheet (and sometimes printing only every fifth worksheet--every fifth usually being a review of the previous four pages) was enough. And we didn't use the lesson plans at all (my son found them too repetitive).

 

We really enjoyed using MEP. So much that I sometimes wish I have another child to use it with. :)