Continue with Saxon or ?

[nastulip]

We are moving to another state, pulling the kids out of school and starting to homeschool with 3 kids. They have been using Saxon in their Charter school and all seem to be doing well, except I'm worried about DS. We put him on school early.. He is now 7.5 finishing 2nd grade and Saxon 3, the school starts Saxon 1 after first 2 months of kinder. My DS is very active and has difficulty concentrating. I'm afraid that Saxon 5/4 will be way too much for him, especially copying problems... I saw they have intermediate 3, so I could try that. Math is not difficult for him mind you, he just doesn't sit well, and has trouble with copying, writing. Need some ideas for an average Math student with concentration/ sitting issues :)

[Jim]

If it's working I'd stick with it. 5/4 is much different than the prior levels but the writing is really just showing your work, not necessarily re-writing every problem. We split the assignment up. Completing the Mental Math portion, read the lesson, and do the proctice problems together. Ds does half the problems at that point. The remainder are homework.

 

I would not pick and chose problems or do odds or evens. We're believers that the program was written a certain way for a reason so we complete each and every problem, as designed.

 

 

Jim

[Chris in VA]

We worked it in a similar way to Jim--splitting up the problem set so some was done later in the day. (We got thru Saxon 3 in 2nd grade, then dd went to school in 3rd--when she came back in 4th grade, we did Saxon 6/5.)

 

For the first 6-10 weeks, I went thru and copied the problems for dd, so she had some "worksheets." It really only took me a few minutes a day, and I worked ahead over the summer so as to have them ready when our school started. I weaned her off that gradually, having her copy a portion, then all of them. It really wasn't as big a deal as I thought it'd be.

 

I also want to add that she was making some careless mistakes (not usually in copying but in computation), so every morning, before I looked at her work from the previous day, I gave her a few minutes to look it over before "handing it in." She often caught two or even three small mistakes. I'd grade it then, not the night before, and it seemed to help her.