Should I think about anything in particular re: these results?

[SarahW]

So, after seeing people around here talk about Prodigy, I showed it to Crazypants and asked him if he wanted to give it a go. He was thrilled with it, and started playing it a lot. Hey, it's a computer game, a game with math in it, and mom doesn't bug about being on the computer so much. Win!

 

So I was curious and logged in to the reports section, and saw he placed into 8th grade. Ooohhkaay...since it's adaptive maybe he'll fall back after playing some more. But nope, he hasn't. He's steadily trucking through the 8th grade curriculum, turning more than a few of the topic bars green already. According to the usage impact breakdown, he's played 161 minutes, with 20 wrong answers and 217 correct ones.

 

When he first started playing, I told him that if he wasn't sure about something he could read the hint. I thought they'd be hints like in BA, but apparently they aren't? Since we've read a lot of math books and he reads BA, and he has pretty good number sense, he seems to read the hints to learn how to do the problem, and do them successfully.

 

The "hints" don't seem to have a lot of conceptual depth (from the glimpses I've seen) but since I now see scraps of paper around the house with circles and radius and pi equations scribbled on them, I think his understanding is a lot more than "rote."

 

I'm not sure what to think about this, or if I need to think about this. I've long suspected that if he just "applied himself" he'd progress much easier through his schoolwork. I know he's quirky and it's not a moral failing on his part. But it is still really frustrating. And now there's this stupid game which is accomplishing what I can't. Grrr.....  :svengo:

 

I don't know anything about "Ontario Grade 8" curriculum.  I don't know much about Prodigy. I don't know much about what is going on here, except that maybe the kid is going to be done with procedural Pre-A within the next month or so.

 

I'm still planning to keep going with BA. So I'm not thinking of changing anything because of this. But can anyone tell me what is going on? Is everything going to be okay?  :laugh:

[wapiti]

Thinking out loud, suppose you followed up with Alcumus (prealgebra topics).  Or just moved on to the prealgebra text.

[Arcadia]

I'll just start him on aops prealgebra book and keep BA for fun. Both EPGY (renamed gifted & talented) and prodigy math couldn't hold my boys attention. Neither could Khan.

[quark]

FWIW, we never followed a formal prealgebra program. AoPS prealgebra was published much later or we might have done that. Everything kiddo did up to algebra I is prealgebra in my book. It is such a waste of time for bright kids to delay one more year in the name of completing a review program that curriculum providers use to make more money.

 

No idea about Prodigy but we had the same issue Arcadia mentions with EPGY, Khan, Thinkwell and Aleks. Kiddo at 7yo was initially thrilled with Thinkwell's prealgebra because Prof Burger is funny but soon lost interest in that too because the problems were too rote/ simple. We just skipped to Dolciani's Algebra 1 and followed up with first half of AoPS Intro to Algebra. It helped to not think in grade levels and name of levels here. We just moved to something that felt natural. You can always classify it as what you want to later.

 

So cool that he is having fun with it...that's a big headache solved for many people. Kiddo used some online games as well but we didn't want to think of it as his true grade level in math. We just went past the whole grade level classification because I notice that it tends to trap us into thinking within a box or worse, assuming that's all there is to math.

 

Probably not helpful, but just wanted to throw it out there.

[MotherOfBoys]

We just found Prodigy two days ago. They played it so long my computer shut down so it didn't melt! It's a flash game that makes the fan run constantly. They played it for an hour today before the screen started blinking and I had to kick them off. I wish I could lock my younger son into a grade level. It had him doing mean, median, and mode. He eventually became tired and the scrap paper became full. My older son would never stop if the computer didn't make him.

[maize]

We just found Prodigy two days ago. They played it so long my computer shut down so it didn't melt! It's a flash game that makes the fan run constantly. They played it for an hour today before the screen started blinking and I had to kick them off. I wish I could lock my younger son into a grade level. It had him doing mean, median, and mode. He eventually became tired and the scrap paper became full. My older son would never stop if the computer didn't make him.

 

You can give assignments from your parent account.  I do that a lot for my kids. 

[Dmmetler]

My DD did much the same thing with the DOMA math assessment-she was able to figure out things she didn't know in context, just by plowing through them. We jumped to pre-algebra, and haven't looked back since. I've seen her do the same thing on ACT Prep-it's a LOT more fun to figure out the problems that she hasn't had before vs the ones that she knows how to do easily. (Which is great, except that it means she almost never finishes an ACT problem set-because she'd rather spend the time on a few more interesting problems than a bunch of easy ones...)

 

 

[SarahW]

I just realized, I think I posted a few months ago asking if I should just buy the aops Pre-A for him. I was thinking about it, but then I looked at the sample again and got scared of the words again. He's a strong reader, but his comprehension lags. He's getting better, especially non-fiction. The other day we were poking around a used bookstore and CP was doing his usual I'm-bored-let's-go-already routine, so I pulled out a book called Concepts of Number Theory or something and told him to read it, lol. It was a super dense book, but he sat and read it for a while, and I don't think he got it all, but he did teach me all about perfect numbers when we left the store. He wanted to buy the book, but it was actually pretty pricey. I told him that the people who make BA have a book about that, and I'd get it for him sometime. So maybe he is ready for the Pre-A book.

 

Prodigy is doing what I was hoping KA would do, fill in his gaps and not make him practice things he already knows over and over (so boring!). But I think KA was too incremental and took too long to declare mastery for a topic. He seems pretty happy with how Prodigy moves him through the topics. Though several of his wrong answers are because he forgot to reduce fractions to the LCF, and he started to get annoyed with how many of those fraction questions he got. Make sure you read the directions, kid.

 

BA had been the one curriculum that seemed to be a nearly perfect fit for him, so I'm a bit pouty if it turns out he's beyond it already. He still says BA is his favorite, but I have noticed him getting frustrated with some things. Like in 4A where it had the student "discover" that all the angles add up to 360. He was like, "yeah, a circle is 360, so obviously.... why didn't they just say that?" I tried to explain that we know that because if we put lines through a circle the angles will be 360, and he was like "yeah, duh..." But he still needs my help to get through a few pages of BA effectively, on his own he tends to get mixed up and then lets his frustration take over. But if I am going to sit with him for math anyways, maybe sitting with him for Pre-A wouldn't be much different?

 

Would Pre-A explain all the concepts behind dividing fractions, or the "sign rules" for multiplying or dividing negative and positive numbers, or other stuff like that? I'm worried about jumping over the conceptual explanation for the arithmetic he's doing.

[maize]

Yes, if memory serves the first chapter of AOPS pre-algebra goes through the concepts behind arithmetic pretty thoroughly.

[Arcadia]

For what its worth, my two jokers non-fiction comprehension were a lot higher than fiction comprehension according to the piles of tests their public school teachers did. The gap is wider for my kid that doesn't read as widely.

 

As what Quark said upthread, it is less stressful when you don't think in terms of grade levels.

 

Quark has a lovely math booklist too on her blog which is in her sig. I think.

[epi]

I don't know what "Prodigy" is but it sounds like the questions might be too routine to say a kid is really on the level they claim.

Maybe just keep doing BA, and at the same time do Alcumus Prealgebra problems to see how he goes with a more challenging style of question.

[SarahW]

Thanks for the replies, all. I don't know where I would be with this kid without the Hive.

 

I'm not really concerned with "grade level" so much, just with meeting his level of maturity and giving him something he visually likes. It seemed we were finally hitting a sweet spot with BA, but now.... I was surprised to see multi-digit multiplication in 4A, CP had been doing that for a while now. I had him do the practice pages, it was only a few pages after all. But maybe I should start modifying the practice books and skipping over things he's done with. At least for now. We're moving (again!) at the end of the month, so I'm not keen on putting in an international RR order right now. Eta: I just found out that UKMT sells the aops books. But I did promise CP I'd buy the BA5 books at some point, and they don't sell those, so I'd need to make a RR order anyways....

 

I do see the value of not dragging this out, like quark said. He's also already playing around with some algebra concepts, and I accidentally ILL'd him the Murderous Math Trig book, so he's been reading up on that too. So, yeah, I don't even know "where" he's at.

Edited May 10, 2016 by SarahW

[Arcadia]

See if he likes Calculus by and for young people; free book and worksheets in PDF http://mathman.biz

[SarahW]

See if he likes Calculus by and for young people; free book and worksheets in PDF http://mathman.biz

 

 

Yeah. I looked at that a little bit ago...but I don't understand it.  :blushing:

 

But maybe if I print it off and hand it to him...he'll do fine. Lol.

[mckittre]

Good to think about what your kid needs, but I wouldn't put too much stock in the Prodigy grade levels. My 7yo is happily enjoying the 6th grade prodigy curriculum, and I think he's reasonably good at math, but no genius. When I look over his shoulder I see that the questions have the same format over and over again -- no puzzles, no tricks. So if you can figure out the area of a triangle once, you can keep doing that until the program decides you've mastered it.