Newbie here seeking some help

[Larsonfamily1234]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm  newbie here to the WTM community. We've been homeschooling in a hodge podge kind of way. It worked for a while but not so much now. So we decided to change our approach to homeschooling. We have 4 children ages soon to be 10, 8, soon to be 7, and a soon to be 2 year old. I have a copy of the WTM book from 2009 that I got from the library. I've been reading through it and make a ton of notes.

 

I feel good about what we've got for history & geography, and what we're gonna be using for spelling/reading

 

I need some help with figuring out Writing for my kids. We were using Winning with Writing with the two oldest and my husband hates it! He doesnt feel like it's challenging enough or thorough enough. I've got an idea of what I want to use for handwriting/penmanship and I thought I was content with Rod and Staff for my oldest and then I got on here and read about WWE. I was wondering if I could use WWE instead of Rod and Staff? I'm afraid my daughter is going to go from loving language work to hating it with Rod and Staff. If I can use it, is there extra I would need to do with WWE?

 

I was also wondering about math. We've been doing Right Start math. I don't like it but then again I dont like math! I'm honestly not looking for something that's expensive and has lots of parts. We've got limited space for supplies. I found a program called Math Mammoth. Is anyone familiar with it? Is it worth looking into?

 

My kids are not into math. I really need something that is straight forward but not as dry as dirt if that makes sense.

 

Thanks for your help and ideas!

 

-Jen

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

I can only comment on the math:

 

- Math Mammoth is considered a very good program.  It is probably best described as a budget-friendly version of singapore math.  The samples on the website are good, so you can always print out a few pages and see what your kids think.  

 

What's nice about MM is that it's written directly to the child and there is only ONE book.  It can't replace direct instruction, but the instructions may be enough to get kids back on track instead of interrupting a sibling's lesson.  

 

Biggest complaints about MM are that the pages are quite crowded.  Just remember you're the boss, and you can assign only odds or evens or whatever, if you feel there is just too much.

[Larsonfamily1234]

Thanks for your comment. I will hope over to their site and take a look at their samples. I was looking at their site on my phone which wasn't working that well.

[Jackie]

Math Mammoth is absolutely a solid program and fairly hands off for you. I did find it a bit weaker on word problems than I'd like, so if I were using it as my primary program I would likely supplement with Singapore's Challenging Word Problems book. But I supplement everything, so don't mind me. :)

 

I've gone a completely different direction than you for language arts (Brave Writer and Michael Clay Thompson), so I'm not likely much help to you there.

[2_girls_mommy]

WWE is just writing.  R&S is a full English grammar and writing.  If you get rid of R&S for WWE, you will then need to pick something else for grammar.  And R&S is the best there is for grammar, lol.  A lot of people use R&S for the grammar, but then just don't do the writing composition exercises in R&S, using WWE or something else instead.

 

The writing exercises are solid in it, though it doesn't do dictation.  You would need to add that in. I personally skipped WWE and just did R&S from the beginning and added in my own copywork, narrations, summaries, etc. using the WTM as a guide.

 

[UnlikelyHomeschoolingMama]

Rod and Staff would include grammar as well as writing and WWE is only Writing. You could supplement with First Language Lessons, but both FLL and WWE is fairly teacher intensive.  I'm going CLE Language Arts with my oldest and supplementing with WWE.  I think CLE and Rod and Staff are "somewhat" similar, but others can speak to that. 

 

The only thing I would think with your 10 year old is that WWE is no pen to paper...or very little.  If he/she has already been composing, this may feel like a step back.  While it would probably be good in the long run, just need to keep that in mind.  I will be finishing up WWE 2 with my daughter this year.  She is so so SO ready for pen to paper writing (she writes 10 page stories, composes letters, etc. on a regular basis) so I'm moving to Writers in Residence.  I got a copy for a very good price and it looks phenomenal.  It is for 4th-6th graders and we'll start in the second half of 3rd grade.  

 

Good luck with your decisions! Choices are so difficult!  

[Garga]

CLE math is good. It's a series of workbooks with 16 (I think) lessons per book. There are 10 a year, but the first book is a review of the previous year.

 

The lessons are written to the student.

 

It's a spiral type of math, which means that each day they learn a tiny bit of new information and then the rest of the lesson is review. Some of the review was learned that week, some of the review is from weeks ago. It constantly cycles through the concepts so that they're not forgotten.

 

If you google for "welltrainedmind cle math" you'll probably find a bunch of threads about it. It's known for being a very solid program, but as with everything, it won't work for everyone. It does work well for many, many students.

[Elizabeth 2]

We love Math Mammoth. I used it for 1st-4th (two years total each for 2 DS), but have through 6th. I have two very distractable DS. It works very well. With DS8, I complete the first part of the lesson with him, then he completes it on his own. DS 10 uses Khan Academy as needed to teach lessons if the instructions aren't enough. To supplement the story problems, as a pp said, I just look for real life application. We actually found Saxons print to be more distracting than MM. I have no idea why. But, DS 10

 

Since I had two DS when I purchased the program, I purchased the digital option on Educents years ago. It is less than $10 each year to print, cutting costs dramatically. Also, when DD 2 got into the grade 2 sheets with scissors, I just reprinted. Life. Saver.

[Kiara.I]

We're a Rightstart family so I'd be inclined to ask what you don't like about it and see if that can be remedied before just switching away from it. It is expensive but if you already have it, that makes it cheaper than most other options, you know?

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[Larsonfamily1234]

2_girls_mommy and UnlikelyHomeschoolingMama you both helped me to understand that difference between R&S and WWE. Thanks so much. 2_girls_mommy you said that you added in your own copy work, narrations, summaries, etc. using the WTM as a guide. Could you tell me how you did that? I'd like to understand better how I might be able to do something similar. UnlikelyHomeschoolingMama my oldest doesnt do much writing at all. The assignments she's done in her previous curriculum was just sad to say the least. By the way what is CLE? I'm slowly catching on to the WTM lingo :)

 

Ya'll make Math Mammoth appealing for sure! Kiara for some reason Right Start feels like drudgery to me. It's the last thing I want to do. My DD fights with me about it. Some of the things I've had a hard time explaining or understanding. Math was never my strong suit and I struggled a lot in school. I didn't learn to look at numbers in 10's and 5's. I had to look up how to use the abacus for multiplication....sad I know.....we have up to level C and I've been trying to be more consistent this year doing it every day.

 

Kiara do you do one lesson a day or more than one a day?

 

This is like a whole new world for me thanks for all your input and helping me navigate things.

[MrsRobinson]

We love Math Mammoth here! I am not mathy at all either and the simplicity of explanation has been great for me too! My DD would tell you that several times I've said some variation of, "oh! That makes perfect sense! Why didn't they teach it like that when I was in school?!" And that's just the 2nd grade book! Like pp, I remember more word problems in PS than what MM offers. I just print freebies from Pinterest every few weeks to break up lessons and do something different.

[2_girls_mommy]

Copywork and dictation can come from anywhere.  Copying can be from books, handwriting programs, the Bible, anything you are working on.  The same with dictation. There are lots of old threads on dictation, and it goes into detail on how to do it all in the writing sections of WTM.

[Kiara.I]

Ya'll make Math Mammoth appealing for sure! Kiara for some reason Right Start feels like drudgery to me. It's the last thing I want to do. My DD fights with me about it. Some of the things I've had a hard time explaining or understanding. Math was never my strong suit and I struggled a lot in school. I didn't learn to look at numbers in 10's and 5's. I had to look up how to use the abacus for multiplication....sad I know.....we have up to level C and I've been trying to be more consistent this year doing it every day.

 

Kiara do you do one lesson a day or more than one a day?

 

We do one lesson a day (per student), unless they're a concept that the child has totally mastered and is very much review, or the lesson only winds up taking 5 minutes (we've run into a few of those, like a lesson on fractions and money, and how quarters are a quarter of a dollar...yeah, that one didn't take very long for my 9-year-old who gets his allowance paid in quarters.  ;) )   Some people do choose to do more than one lesson a day if they're trying to catch up, but even then it's usually more practical to do math 6 days a week and working through holidays as well, rather than trying to cram too much into one day.

 

Well, it's not fun to be slogging through a program that feels like drudgery unless you really believe it's worthwhile for some reason.  So it really might be best for you to switch to one that doesn't feel like that for you.

 

Before you do, though...NONE of us were taught to look at numbers in 10s and 5s, really.  Whether we were mathy or not, it simply wasn't how math was taught when we were in school (at least for most of us, I'm sure there will be an exception somewhere on the board!  LOL)  It's an Asian style of math education, and one reason for the popularity of it in homeschooling circles is how well students in Asian countries tend to do compared to North American students.  So yes, it's a learning curve, but some of us decide it's totally worth it...and others decide it isn't.  It's up to you, really.  Parents have great success with LOTS of different curricula out there!

 

And in C, you probably haven't been doing much multiplication on an abacus yet...but why wouldn't you have to look it up?  Sure, if you've never used an abacus to do much math, you'd need to be taught how.  I had to learn it right alongside my oldest as he learned it.  So I wouldn't say that's "sad" at all, more like "it's expected!"