Dolciani PreAlgebra: how did you use it?

[dori123]

Looks like there is a lesson with a few exercises to do together. Then there are practice sets A, B, C and then Review Exercises...?

How did you all structure your class and is there enough practice (looking for 20-25 problems per lesson / total time about one hour).

Is there a difference in difficulty between A, B and C sets? 

TIA

 

 

 

[Farrar]

A problems are easy peasy, B are standard, C are hard - sometimes AoPS kind of level hard, though not always. In the TE, it says pretty clearly that kids on a regular track don't "need" to do the C level ones often.

The number of problems was nearly always plenty sufficient for my student. In fact, we often started by doing the evens or odds and then only did the others if he needed more practice, which was maybe about a third of the time. We also did the review exercises routinely, which was more practice. The only thing I wished there were more of were A and B level word problems in the word problem sections - sometimes my student needed more practice with easier problems to warm up to the harder ones. There'd be like two A problems and then a lot more B. Or just four B problems and then several C. There are usually a couple of extra A problems in the TE though. And word problems are the book's strength overall - it really goes above and beyond with the word problems anyway.

I used the Chapter Review as the test. However, if you have the TE, there's another test in there, you just have to copy it out. I ended up doing that a couple of times when my student didn't do well enough on the first "test."

We typically did one lesson a day. However, I'm not fussy about it. We're open and go for math most of the time. If he ran out of time, we'd just pick it up the next day. It was a good "do the next thing" curriculum.

 

[dori123]

Excellent response -- just what I was looking for. Thank you!

[Lucy the Valiant]

We did it very similarly, usually doing the A-level problems verbally just to verify understanding. We often did only the odds or evens, but did do most of the C-levels.