key to math series

[angelmama1209]

what grades is this series recommended for? is it a full curriculum or just a supplement? how would it fit in relation to math mammoth?

[Farrar]

I think they say grade 4 and up on them, but it's a loose guide. They're not for any particular grade - they're more for whenever a student is ready for those topics. They tend to be pretty simple - certainly the algebra ones aren't a really good algebra I program - closer to a pre-algebra. They don't have any lessons or teaching beyond the pages (the teacher pages are just an answer key). There are explanations on the page of how to work the problems but they're light. Still, the way the problems are set up is well thought out and meant to be teaching by going from easier to harder and leading in with ones to get kids to think about what they're doing. But don't underestimate them - I think they're excellent for a variety of purposes - as a main program for a kid who needs something gentle for awhile, as a brush up for a kid who didn't get it the first time, as an introduction for a kid who is a quick study.

 

They're not so different from MM that I would think you would use them together unless a kid needed some very specific, targeted review. In some ways they're very similar to MM - teaching right on the page, incremental problems sometimes with scaffolding in between steps to help learn before going to the algorithm, good for independent work, could be compared to the MM single topic books... However, in some ways they're very different - more of the same sort of way of posing the problem and less of showing different methods, cleaner layout, much briefer overall.