Stick with MUS or switch to Right Start (x-post)

[sweetpea3829]

Folks...

 

DD10 has been using MUS through Gamma level.  She has a LD diagnosis of dyscalculia, poor number sense (but much better than it was) and poor reasoning/critical thinking skills.  

 

She has made decent progress with Math U See.  She can do the computations and I have been pleased overall.  But...she is not making many strides in conceptual growth and I am concerned that, as we approach more complicated topics (division, fractions, decimals...I'm looking at you), DD will begin to falter in her procedural growth.  Her math foundation is so weak...I'm hesitant to continue building on it without going back and at least attempting to shore up those conceptual gaps.  Sure...she can add, subtract and multiply.  But it's still hard.  It's still taxing for her.

 

I have been considering a switch.  I hear that Right Start is a great program for kids that struggle with math.  But it's expensive and there's a strong possibility it will fail for her, as many other maths that we've tried for her.  

 

I have Singapore Math, but the cognitive flexibility it requires is still beyond her.  I have Math Mammoth and have been reviewing things like number bonds with her...and she can use some of those principles during a lesson, but not apply them on her own.  

 

I almost feel like we are at a crossroads here.  Continue on with what we've been doing and just keep shooting for the math she needs to survive adulthood.  

 

Or go back and work on conceptual stuff.  

 

She's in a good place, psychologically, with math right now.  She says she is good at math, which...is huge. But I see the future for her and I'm just not sure she has enough conceptual understanding to be successful with the next few levels of MUS.

 

Thoughts? 

 

 

[Clear Creek]

If you stick with MUS, Delta is focused primarily on division so you will have some time before she will need to start figuring out fractions and decimals. Delta is hard, though, and will expose any weak spots she has with computation. The problems go straight from learning division to dividing hundreds to dividing thousands and ten thousands, and my daughter got burned out on it. MUS taught the concepts of long division really well, it was just too much all at once. I switched her to Horizons and put her back at the beginning of the 4th grade book to give her a chance to start at the beginning of long division all over again (basically what you are considering doing with your daughter - giving her a second exposure to the concepts with another program). My daughter much prefers the spiral format of Horizons, so we are sticking with it for the time being, but if it hadn't worked I would have put her back in MUS since she was learning from it.

 

If you want to continue with MUS and use a supplement to work on the conceptual skills on the side, I used Primarily Math with my daughter. It was very slow going, but it eventually gave her the tools to solve word problems that she was not getting from MUS.

[kateingr]

First of all, I'd say to make sure to pat her and yourself on the back for how far she's come! Feeling confident in math with a dyscalculia diagnosis is not small potatoes. 

 

Since your daughter isn't quite fluent in addition, subtraction, and multiplication, I think you're making a good call in spending some time shoring up those areas before heading into division. Division requires using all of those skills (along with good number sense for estimating). If she has to spend so much of her working memory on those operations, it'll be hard to have enough brain space left to learn division. 

 

RightStart is indeed a great program, but I see several potential drawbacks to simply switching her into the program.

 

1) A lot of the benefit from RightStart comes from starting with the foundational work on place value and mental math in levels A and B. But the program is very hard to accelerate (and very expensive), so you wouldn't want to go all the way back to B. 

 

2) The spiral nature of RightStart would make it very hard to transition from a program as strictly mastery-oriented as MUS. RightStart develops so many topics along the way that if you put your daughter in D, she'd be missing a lot of the those pieces. 

 

Have you considered using RightStart's Activities for the AL Abacus (and worksheets) instead? It's a streamlined and simplified version of the curriculum, and it would give you a chance to revisit place-value, addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The MUS blocks are great, but using a different manipulative for a second pass through those topics would give her another way to think about them and help broaden (and hopefully solidify) her conceptual understanding. 

[Calm37]

This is where I hit a blip with MUS with my youngest. At the end of Gamma it was obvious that she had not mastered her multiplication facts. It exhausted her to do long multiplication.

 

We stopped and worked on the facts for several months. I did not realize it at the time, but that memorization work ended up making division (Delta) very easy for her. We used MUS all the way through PreCalc.

 

 

[kalusignan]

 

Have you considered using RightStart's Activities for the AL Abacus (and worksheets) instead? It's a streamlined and simplified version of the curriculum, and it would give you a chance to revisit place-value, addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The MUS blocks are great, but using a different manipulative for a second pass through those topics would give her another way to think about them and help broaden (and hopefully solidify) her conceptual understanding. 

 

I was also going to suggest this, plus possibly also including the games. The game book has sections: Number Sense, Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Money, etc. You can literally go through a section and play all the games, and there are a lot to choose from. And, you'll still be able to use it after you decide to move on to division.

[OneStepAtATime]

Along with the great suggestions up thread, I would also encourage you to consider letting her use a math chart for lessons in division while working on multiplication separately.  If you hold her back completely while you try to get math facts 100% solid, she may not ever make much progress past this point and she might actually be good at other kinds of math if she ever got the chance.  

 

Also, seriously look at doing lattice method multiplication and partial quotient division.  They looked really odd to me (and freaked me out a bit) but once I mastered those techniques I could see why a math specialist recommended them for DD (also dyscalculic).  They have been serious game changers here.  It just takes a bit to get used to doing them.

 

 

[bluedarling]

Second vote for give her a multiplication chart and move on.  Rightstart games are great to play on the side to shore up those skills, but you don't need to switch curriculum just for that....just get the game book and add it to MUS.  I think MUS is likely a good fit for your dd, with its focus on the basic operations and clean layout.  We lost so much ground trying to switch curriculums to "shore up".  Facts just weren't going to stick (though somewhere in their teens they finally started getting them.)  My kids got the concepts, though...just slow due to poor math facts.  If your child didn't have the concepts, I could see adding in another program.  I did combine RS and MUS, and thought that worked well for awhile (I added it for my gifted child, though, for more variety, not for a struggling child.)