Anyone tried JUMP math?

[cathmom]

I think it looks promising.

[NASDAQ]

It's a Canadian program originally.

 

AFAIK it's got fairly good research behind it. And the Toronto District School Board issued a fatwa against it, which is a good sign.

 

It's slow-moving and incremental. It proceeds in very small steps and works towards mastery. It might not scratch your itch if you're looking for something Singapore-like.

[specialmama]

I'm signed up for some of their teaching seminars online and hope to do one in person next month. Will be doing it next year with my special needs son. I love that it's slow and incremental and the teacher's manual (free online) is amazing. They offer so many hands-on activities and sites to explore in order to meet every learner's needs. I agree, it looks very promising. I also like the extra worksheet option (Jump at Home) for those that really need the extra time to achieve mastery. A little gem is that if you start early enough in the lower grades, you can save a ton by ordering all the grade levels at once. I may do this because my son is actually working at a grade 2 level.

 

Pasted from their site:

Special Offer: AP Book Sample Pack

 

If you want to evaluate our student resources, you should know about our special offer: a sample pack containing one copy of each of our 16 grade-specific AP Books for just $100. That's more than $40 less than the regular volume-discounted price for this full set of AP Books.

To place this sample order with our distributor, please cite ISBN 978-1-897120-98-9. Please note that no other discounts are applicable to this order, it is non-returnable, and it is restricted to one order per customer.

Please note that the Sample Pack does not contain a copy of the Introductory Unit Using Fractions (Grades 3 & 4), Introductory Unit Using Fractions (Grades 5 & 6), or the Teacher's Manual for the Introductory Unit, all of which may be downloaded and copied for free (see below).

For a list of JUMP Math print titles and ISBNs, see our order form.

[jen3kids]

And the Toronto District School Board issued a fatwa against it, which is a good sign.

 

 

 

 

Are you kidding? What a bunch of .....

 

 

 

I love JUMP math. I used it for my youngest in grades 4 and 5. We did the review parts orally (he had a serious aversion to putting anything down on paper!) and he loved the lay out of the book - nothing distracting on those pages, just the math! He was a level ahead, but it perfect fit for him, or as perfect as it could be for a supposed math-hating kid. We used it along with Life of Fred, and it worked out well for us. If he hadn't gone to ps, we would still be using it.

 

My dd used the fraction booklets only - it is available as a free download. It solidified her basics in fractions and she had struggled with it for a year before I 'discovered' the program.

 

Oh, and we tried a lot of math curriculums...

Math-U-See

Singapore

Miquon

Horizons

Teaching Textbooks

 

but JUMP fit my youngest the best.

 

[LucyStoner]

I know someone using it for a 5th grader who LOVES it. I printed some of their free very beginning math stuff for my little guy and like it.

[Celia]

It could be kind of slow if you kid is math-minded, but other than that I've heard it's good. I've heard it was designed to be remedial, but I'm not sure about that. What's a fatwa?

[NASDAQ]

Fatwa is used satirically here. The Toronto District School Board issued a release saying it was Bad Bad Bad and not to be used.

 

http://swmathematics.wikispaces.com/file/view/TDSB+Position+on+the+use+of+JUMP+Math.pdf

[mom2bee]

What's a fatwa?

 

A fatwa is a ruling from an Islamic court. Kind of like a verdict. It is just a ruling or a judgement made by Islamic judges/scholars/what have you to decide how modern advances, technologies, and social fads fit into traditional Islamic societies.

 

In Western media, its almost always presented to be a bad thing, but that is a misconception. It was, however, the negative connotation that NASDAQ was going for, she was just being sarcastic.

[stripe]

The Toronto District School Board issued a release saying it was Bad Bad Bad and not to be used.

Wow! I had no idea.

[Neesy]

Jump Math - Consider the following article and decide for yourself:

 

 

Toronto public schools slow to adopt JUMP math program by Kate Hammer

 

 

The Globe and Mail published

Monday, May. 23 2011, 10:53 PM EDT

Last updated Friday, Aug. 24 2012, 3:59 PM EDT

 

 

After nearly two decades of helping children decipher which train reaches its destination first, or how many cantaloupes Sally needs to sell in order to make a profit, there is growing evidence for a back-to-basics approach to teaching math.

In theory, Toronto has been at the leading edge of this pedagogical shift, with a program known as JUMP math that began more than a decade ago as an after-school tutoring program in the Christie Pits neighbourhood.

But in practice, JUMP has had a tough time here. While school boards in Northern Ontario, British Columbia and the United Kingdom have embraced it, JUMP has had a warmer reception from private schools in the GTA than it has from the public education system.

 

A recent study may help it gain traction with local school boards. The results haven't been published - they're currently under review - but are promising partly because control studies investigating pedagogical techniques aren't terribly common.

 

"I think part of the resistance toward JUMP is it flies in the face of way people currently think mathematics should be taught," said Tracy Solomon, a researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children, and author of the study. "There has been a real emphasis on teaching kids math by presenting them what are called contextually rich or everyday problems. … The JUMP approach is totally the opposite."

That means reducing a problem to its component parts and then building it back up incrementally. There is an emphasis on rehearsing the basics, or as cognitive psychologists would say, "automatizing" knowledge.

 

Her group followed nearly 300 Grade 5 students at a Northern Ontario school board for five months. Slightly more than half were taught using the JUMP method, while the remainder following the regular problem solving-based program.

 

In that short time frame, students in the JUMP group showed significantly larger gains in a number of measures of math achievement, including fluency and quantitative concepts.

 

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Lambeth school district has been using JUMP for four years. This is a high-needs, underachieving district, and in 2007, when the program started, the students were performing 6 percentage points behind the national average on national exams.

By 2010, they were 2 percentage points ahead.

 

Rotherglen, a private school with campuses in Oakville and Mississauga, started using Jump last fall with its Grade 4 and 5 students, 126 in total.

Academic co-ordinator Amy Gill said the program appealed to her because it takes into account recent developments in cognitive science.

 

"The traditional model is the teacher explains things and then the students do practice problems," she said. "But this program is very interactive and there's lots of guided practice.… It really relies on brain plasticity and student engagement."

 

She said her school has seen a boost in class test scores and in students' enthusiasm for math class.

 

Both the Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board have being using JUMP at a handful of schools, in a limited capacity. Neither has designs to apply the program more broadly in the immediate future.

Gen Ling Chang, co-ordinating superintendent of teaching and learning for the TDSB, said for now it is a supplementary program for struggling students.

"We have to look more closely at it," she said.