Right Start card games -- use as curriculum?

[anabelneri]

Hello!

 

I have a child who tends toward challenging to teach. I was thinking today about options for teaching her math next year (K-1st), and started wondering about the RS math card games. Has anyone used it as a curriculum? Or even just used it extensively, playing most of the games? Has anyone encountered a blog post about doing that?

 

Any help would be welcome!

Thank you!

[IrishMum]

It pretty much all I did for math when my younger two were 5 and 6 ish. I don't buckle down with math till 2nd grade. We still play the games! No blogs posts, sorry.

[Tonia]

I haven't used it as a curriculum but I certainly think it's possible to just play the games for K-1st.

[Eagle]

We are doing a LOT of math games these days (along with LoF and Miquon) and ds is learning so much from the games. He is really solidifying his math facts from repeated practice. In addition to playing a game during our official school time in the morning, ds now wants to play more after dinner each night with the whole family. He used to take *forever* to eat, but is now eating at a much quicker pace so we will have more time for games!

 

His current favourite is Math War, particularly Multi-Digit War (we call it Place Value war) and Addition War:

http://letsplaymath.net/2006/12/29/the-game-that-is-worth-1000-worksheets/

 

We don't own the RightStart card games. We have the books "Family Math" and "Games for Math" which are full of fun ideas. Peggy Kaye, author of "Games for Math", has several books on learning through games. We own "Games for Learning", "Games for Writing", "Games with Books". She also has a "Games for Reading" that I haven't looked at. The books are aimed at grades K through 3 and provide not only the ideas for games, but also a narrative on why each game is useful for learning.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Peggy+Kaye

http://www.amazon.com/Family-Math-Equals-Series-Stenmark/dp/0912511060/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370352086&sr=8-1&keywords=Family+math

[Kerileanne99]

Definitely for K/1st material! You can always use the Activities for Al Abacus as well.

I have a very young, mostly pre-writer who wanted math ALL the time so this is how we went about much of it.

You might also take a look at GiggleFacts math- a series of 26 steps in the form of fun, brightly-colored games, that teaches/reinforces addition and subtraction. My dd still asks to play them.

http://www.gigglelearn.com/

 

[melbotoast]

For money and clocks, we went through in order and that was very effective. For addition, I felt like it was focused more on memorizing the facts rather than learning strategies/developing understanding, but for K/1 that should be fine. Another thing to be aware of is that RightStart teaches addition first and then teaches subtraction later, so there are a lot more games focused on addition.

[anabelneri]

Thank you for the responses! I'm trying to look through the games and see how I should approach this... It might go over beautifully and it might bomb, given this child. But it's nice to know that others have had positive experiences with games.

 

I actually have a lot of math resources to help... We've been trying RSB here and there, and I love what it does, but it's hard to "sell" to my kid. We also have the Kitchen Table Math books, but I haven't gotten my head around how to effectively use those either.

 

:)

[laf919]

I would start with some of the basic activities from the Activities for the AL Abacus book from RightStart and then add in card games. Many of the beginning activities can be done with just the abacus and a white board and marker and you could easily present them as game-like - but those are better at teaching the strategies for understanding addition. The games book is for reinforcement and fun practice. Having used both, I wouldn't want to just do the games, because the explanation in the Activities book are so key - but that is me.

FWIW, we did some of the Activities book and games for k math with my oldest - it is a great foundation. She loved worksheets, so I got the worksheets book and copied and used them with her - but you wouldn't need the worksheets unless you just wanted them - you could easily write things as necessary on a white board or on blank paper. The worksheets are fairly short - only 10 problems each if I remember right - which makes them a bit more appealing to the younger set. Also, the Activities book goes up through long division and fractions - so you could use it with the games to do quite a bit more than just 1st grade math if the system was working for you. We've switched to Beast Academy now and love it, but when I bought the RightStart materials, I was planning to use them through 4th grade or so, and I still think that you could do that effectively if they worked for you and your child.