BA at 6?

[SeaConquest]

If you did BA with your 6 year old, how did it go? Was it a gentle intro to AOPS-style learning? Did anyone have a rough go of it at first or was it a welcome addition/smooth transition?

 

My DS5 and I are currently working through Singapore 2 with just the TB/IP/CWP. I have Zaccaro, Borac, and LOF/living math books for additional enrichment, but I think we may end up hitting Beast this year regardless, and I'd would love to hear your experiences. Thanks! 

[Dmmetler]

BA wasn't out yet when my DD was 6, but I will tell you that the first chapter of BA 3A isn't a gentle introduction to anything. It's hard, fast AOPS learning, and some of the questions frustrated my DD7, who, at the time, had finished SM through 5B and was working on LOF PA. I don't see any reason not to start it and try-but to keep in mind that, yes, it's hard at times. It's supposed to be hard. It's cuter than AOPS PA, but it's not necessarily any easier.

 

And, FWIW, AOPS PA was still a tough transition for her at age 8, even though she'd done BA 3A/3B (we were on AOPS before the others came out, and while I think she'd love doing them, I can't justify spending the money) and had done PA with LOF first. AOPS is just plain different than anything else, and, as DD puts it "If at least one problem in each section doesn't make me go "Eek", they haven't done their job",

 

 

[Crimson Wife]

I wouldn't do BA with a 6 y.o. who is in Singapore 2. BA 3 is by and large harder than SM 3, so I would wait until the child is close to the end of SM 3 before starting BA 3.

 

Now if you said that your 6 y.o. was in SM 3B or beyond, then I'd say to go ahead and try BA 3.

[mamabear2three]

would it make a difference what kind of learner your child is? How quickly they pick up new concepts/are able to apply new knowledge to problems?

 

(wondering because I am in a similar boat of my 6 year old finishing Horizons 2 this year and was thinking about moving her on to Beast)

 

I know that I will have to work with her on learning to deal with challenging problems, but I was kind of hoping that Beast would provide the level of challenge she's not getting from other curricula's (for example, she moved through the first half of Horizons grade 2 in three weeks time, with mastery).

[Roadrunner]

We started BA when younger was an older 6, but he first completed SM 3B. I find the biggest problem to be the retention at such a young age. He did fine, but I plan on running through some of the chapters again as a refresher when he turns eight.

[Kerileanne99]

Well, I do think it will depend on the child...how fast they fill in gaps, but more than anything their tolerance for frustration and problem solving. I started BA 3A with Alex (although she wasn't six) when she was still doing Singapore 2B, but she had already learned multiplication and was pretty fast with recall. She loved the style, but just wasn't ready to tackle the hardest problems for lack of patience. So we did what she wanted of it as a supplement and did a bit more little by little to work on problem solving/patience.

 

We still run Beast well back of what new material she is working on in Singapore. This allows her to stretch herself with the application of material she has already learned. It works really well for us.

[Uff Da!]

nm

[MotherOfBoys]

My son completed MM2 in the spring. We did a 2nd grade School Zone Time, Money, and Fractions book over the summer. He started Beast 3A about 4 weeks ago. He's doing very well. The first two chapters took less than 2 weeks a piece. We took 2 days in the second week of each chapter to review the material. He's ready for the next chapter which I think is going to take 2 weeks also.

 

He loved sitting in opposite places with me, solving the problem, and then going to see how the other person did it. It was "math with mom" instead of mom sitting with him while he does it. My 4 yr old sits with us for the guide reading. He loved the skip counting chapter. I do remember having to reread one section of chapter one because he was too busy looking around the page to pay attention. Now I cover one page while I read the other and I let him look through it right before I read.

 

My only worries is a lack of review. I'm not that worried though because I can pull previous problems to make my own review sheets once in awhile. He likes the colorful guides and lack of busy work. I like the straight to the point as well. I'm a box checker, can't skip anything, and MM made it hard for me to pick what was needed and what wasn't. (most wasn't) Now it's all needed and then I can add.

 

We are waiting for BA3's B-D books to come in the mail. It looks like BA4 will be out when we need it but I'm not sure grade 5 will. We will supplement with MM through 6 or ???

[SierraNevada]

Ds6.5 has done through Singapore 5a, LOF Fractions and Decimals/Percents and has done 3 chapters spread out from BA 3-4. Of those only BA really causes frustration at times. He did his first BA4a chapter when he was almost six and it was just too much frustration for him. He had never been challenged like that before. Right now we are working two chapters retro-actively out of BA 3 (estimating and perfect squares) because I thought those two chapters were great topics that don't really get any kind of coverage in other programs. Now, at having been though all of elementary math in some form, he goes through them much, much easier, but still there are times it pushes him to frustration. I can't imagine starting Beast cold out of any other program after finishing a 2nd grade curriculum. It just does things on such a different level. For DS, I think doing them after he had learned a little more frustration tolerance (not much, but some more) and gong back and basically dropping him down a few grades to do them so that he'd already learned the concepts but just not in the same depth that or way that BA does them. So yes, a six year old can do them, but personally it took a six year old who'd already covered almost all of elementary math to make the transition easy.

[boscopup]

I used it along side CLE 200 with a 6-7 year old who passed the pretest. He did fine until we got to perfect squares in 3B. He could do the formula, but just wasn't mature enough to really understand what he was doing. I dropped it for the time being and will pick it up again later.

 

I was surprised at how well he handled the difficult problems. I didn't feel like he needed another 3rd grade math program beforehand. The perfect squares section wouldn't have been any better if he'd had 3rd grade math. :tongue_smilie: Maturity likely would help.

[sunnyday]

We started BA about a year ago, when DS was 6.5 and just starting work in SM 2A. I didn't feel like we needed mastery of second grade arithmetic to work on the geometry section, and he did have a decent concept of place value and multi-digit addition and subtraction. Ultimately he learned by doing, including learning to view challenges as the path to math mastery, and we worked through 3A and 3B very slowly as an intermittent fun supplement over the course of the year. He wasn't too keen to work on the practice problems for 3B last year so we're doing them now, using the lure of 3C as the reward to work steadily through it. ;)

 

IMO for those who talked about retention with this age group, the strength of the program is that it is so worth re-reading. And re-reading. And re-reading. So that helps a lot...when DS first hit the skip-counting section we talked through it and he got the concepts well enough to get the answers but couldn't necessarily replicate it. Months later after having read the book many times, he pulled out his hundreds chart and went through the skip-counting examples entirely on his own, then crowed quite mightily about his success. ;) I don't regret starting DS young, and I will probably get a new set of practice books for DD around the time she's six as well, but I also don't regret taking plenty of time to let concepts sink in as we go along.

[mamabear2three]

 I don't regret starting DS young, and I will probably get a new set of practice books for DD around the time she's six as well, but I also don't regret taking plenty of time to let concepts sink in as we go along.

 

So here's a question - if you have to shelve the book for a few months, or if a concept is a sticking point, what do you do? Do you run another math program along side so that you can take a break and come back to it later? Or have another program (which one???) waiting to go to when you need a break?

[SeaConquest]

Thank you so much for sharing all of your experiences. Sacha is doing well in Singapore, so it sounds like it makes more sense for us to keep plugging along into at least SM3 before considering Beast. I really appreciate the input.

[sunnyday]

So here's a question - if you have to shelve the book for a few months, or if a concept is a sticking point, what do you do? Do you run another math program along side so that you can take a break and come back to it later? Or have another program (which one???) waiting to go to when you need a break?

 

Yes, definitely. I can afford to be incredibly eclectic because we afterschool, so I don't do any one program that requires marching along Doing Math. We grab intervals of energy and interest and pounce on them with the help of whatever resources I have at hand that will fit his current attitude and advance one or more of our goals. These goals are to improve his stamina for working with numbers (holding multiple steps in his head or recalling facts repeatedly), to improve his tolerance for frustration and his tenacity, to broaden his experience of mathematics as a field, and to give him repeated exposure to the grade-level arithmetic we're at (eg. right now we have done some practice with three-digit addition and subtraction but not a ton, and we're building his skillset in basic multiplication.)

 

To that end I swing through tough concepts, boring easy stuff, interesting engaging stuff (the child adores grid logic puzzles), and back again all the while testing his interest and stretching his attention span as best I can. I pick resources from a wide range of sources in support of these ends. Resources I have at hand include Singapore Math 2A WB and IP, Borac level I, Life of Fred through Goldfish, Beast 3A and 3B, and library "living math" books as well as everyday kitchen and grocery store math. We don't do any of it linearly either, we skip sections in SM and then go back later, or read a section of Beast and do 4-5 practice problems and then the next time we read the same section again and do 3-4 different practice problems, or do some mental math problems and then end on a high note by working a grid logic puzzle. It all gets covered eventually.

 

All I can say is that it seems to be working. After taking the summer off, we're playing math again this weekend, mostly Beast, and he's blowing me away with the numbers he can hold in his head for skip-counting, and with his persistence, as well as his recall. He's filling out his times tables and working out 7 x 7 by "that's 3 14s plus one more 7, so two 14s are 28 and 14 more is 42 and 7 more is 49." We did the pre-assessment for 3B as review and he probably took 10 minutes to figure out where to find the square in the dots, trying different logical approaches and hardly whining at all. Does a momma's heart proud. :) He even remembers how to solve for polyominoes. I had forgotten how to solve those! "Mom, you just color it in like this." Oh!

 

His sister will be a new adventure. She is the perfectionist type who would rather not try than be wrong. But DS had a good dose of that attitude too when we started. I think we'll make a math enthusiast of her yet. ;)

[slackermom]

I think it is hard to say exactly when dd will be ready for the next thing, especially in math, because she is not really an incremental learner.  She makes big leaps.

 

I think my dd would have enjoyed BA at 6, but might have needed a bit more handholding. They are just not your typical math workbooks. I never used Singapore though, so I can't compare.

 

She was 7 when the first BA books came out, and she loved them, but by the time she was 8 she felt she didn't have anything more to learn from the series so I stopped ordering them.

 

She was working her way through Zaccaro's Primary Grade Challenge Math at the same time, and finished that before turning 8. That one was good for her, due to the multi-leveled approach, but by the end of that book she needed another approach for  awhile.

 

We turned to Jacobs' Mathematics: A Human Endeavor, and explored various topics.

 

At 9, I started homeschooling her and got AOPS Pre-Algebra. She is very happy with it. She does blow a gasket now and then, but she always comes back to it.

 

Hmm... looking at her pattern now makes me think I should wait and see before deciding on Algebra.  I was thinking we have found our math home at AOPS, but who knows? 

 

So far, retention has not been a problem, but then dd has a REALLY good memory, which comes in handy when I can't remember where I parked the car.

 

 

 

 

[mamabear2three]

Yes, definitely. I can afford to be incredibly eclectic because we afterschool,

 

And this is exactly where I feel cramped - I can't afford to be eclectic because I just don't have the money. Ordering a full year of Beast is a lot for me.

 

But,

 

His sister will be a new adventure. She is the perfectionist type who would rather not try than be wrong. But DS had a good dose of that attitude too when we started. I think we'll make a math enthusiast of her yet.

 

This is my daughter. So my hope is that Beast will give us a curriculum that gives us challenge and teaches us to try/persevere. My goal this school year is to teach her how to fail and get up and try again, as many times as it takes to succeed. 

 

Maybe I should start Beast now, and save the second half of Horizons 2 for when we have those times when she needs a break and then we have something to go back to for a few days until she is ready to start back up again. 

[Crimson Wife]

 

Maybe I should start Beast now, and save the second half of Horizons 2 for when we have those times when she needs a break and then we have something to go back to for a few days until she is ready to start back up again. 

 

What we were doing for a while was Singapore 4A on M & W, BA 3 (we skipped around in the books because I didn't want the topics to be too close to when DS saw them in SM) on Tu & Th, and then the reviews from SM 3B on Fridays.

 

I'm waiting for my order of BA 4A & 4B to come in from our charter, so now I'm using Singapore CWP.

 

[zarabellesmom]

We started when my daughter was 6.5 after MIF 3A. It was hard, and sometimes she found it frustrating. On the whole, she really loved it and I would do it again in a heartbeat. It really slowed her down and made her think and work at math. We moved through it slowly, and made it halfway though 4A at the end of third grade (so you can see it wasn't a quick run through that we did). We used LOTS of manipulatives. In the chapter on perfect squares, for example, we built perfect squares with the montessori bead chains so she could really see it work. BA saved my daughter's love of math because she wasn't bored doing things incrementally anymore, like she had in MIF.   

 

Good luck with your decision. 

 

Teresa

 

ETA: I started it because it was brand new and there was no one to tell me I shouldn't it. I never looked back.

[sunnyday]

 

And this is exactly where I feel cramped - I can't afford to be eclectic because I just don't have the money. Ordering a full year of Beast is a lot for me.

 

Ah, I didn't mean afford literally. I mean that since DS is getting his linear progression of skills and his math facts at school, I don't feel like I need that "safety net" of doing one program cover-to-cover.

 

It's definitely expensive to stack up the math programs like this. But like I said, Beast 3A and 3B are going to take more than a year for us; I doubt we'll be getting much more SM because DS calls it "boring math" and I keep having to accelerate him past levels; the Borac books are only $6 each and the Fred books are $16 and I've been buying them 2 at a time since he was 5, so just a purchase every 4+ months.

 

Before you invest, take a look at the Beast sample pages. There are tons of them and they'll give you a good idea of the challenge level. I got the weights sample when DS was barely 6 and worked through it with him and he collapsed into a shrieking puddle on the floor (though he eventually solved it.) A few months later, we bought the book for the geometry section and he would moan a little about the tough ones, but was much better with his frustration tolerance. Maturity counts for a lot, and in the interim I'd definitely been reiterating math-positive messages about the best learning coming from things that don't work out right.

[Crimson Wife]

The BA practice books are inexpensive and have instructions at the top of the page. So if your budget is tight, my recommendation would be to see if you can find a copy of the guide books to borrow periodically (maybe suggest your local library purchase them). I've found that DS reads through them as soon as they arrive, then only pulls them off the shelf occasionally.