Teaching Textbooks: Possible to Fast Track?

[teachmejoy]

Is it possible to fast track Teaching Textbooks and finish before the school year to start the next level or is each lesson too time intensive?  My daughter is fairly quick in math and would like to speed up, but I've never used these before. 

[Jess4879]

We typically finish a level and a half during a regular school year. 

[shinyhappypeople]

Sure you can.  You can try testing out of the early lessons (those are mostly basic review) and do more than one lesson a day.  I also had DD skip most of the quizzes, but I was pretty much working side by side with her at that time, so I had a good sense of what she understood and what she needed more help with.

[mamamoose]

Yes, I would say it's completely possible...depending on the student.

[hollyhock]

When I want to fast track with TT, I give my kid the chapter quizzes until we get to one he has trouble with. This has worked pretty well for us.

[OneStepAtATime]

Agree with above, give the quizzes until she hits a snag, let her start there and if she wants to do more than one lesson a day, or do lessons on weekends, go for it.  Skip some of the quizzes for material she seems solid on.  Just don't completely remove yourself from the process.  This program in particular can be sort of "jimmied" where the student, even if they don't realize they are doing it, can learn how to sort of trick the program.  They can move through the material without a ton of retention but have straight A's.  Doesn't happen for every student but you don't want to have her moving rapidly through only to realize halfway through next year that she has a ton of gaps.

[Spryte]

We typically do two lessons per day.  I don't know if that's possible in the higher levels though.

[8Arrows4theLord]

TT runs a bit behind grade level in some concepts. With my oldest we also have doubled up on lessons until the material is harder. She completed Geometry in 4 months with an A. She did switch back to Saxon because she wanted something harder.

  TT is a spiraled math program, so she may test out of one unit but need help in another. I would pretest her before each unit, then determine if she needs to cover the material or not. My second daughter

(Pre- Alg.) did great on one unit, then she had a lot of problems with the next- they switched the type of concepts being taught.

I do agree about them learning how to trick the program, maybe test her with another curriculum occasionally to make sure she really knows the concepts or if she just learned how to get the right answer on the computer. They also get to be slightly dependent on the hints offered. It would be nice if you could disable the hints.

   Good program over all. It has saved me a ton of time not having to grade my older ones math work. They enjoy using it too.

[frogger]

I missed this earlier. One thing I do is have my son do 2 lectures + practice problems and only do the problem set for the second lesson of the day. This might depend on the grade level but in elementary school they will have similar types of problems in both lessons and definitely some from the previous lesson. If he starts getting more wrong I check to see if they are the same type of problem and make sure he understands those and maybe redo just those specific problems.