Completely oral, mental math supplement

[Sarah0000]

Hi. I'm looking for an oral, mental math program designed to systematically improve mental math and recitation skills. This is for my six year old who is in BA 4a and already has decent mental math skills and can visualize math pictures well but he does everything sort of naturally and intuitively. What I'm looking for is something to systematically improve his memory for holding and computing numbers in his head in the four basic operations and something to encourage reciting (not sure what this is called for math?) what he is/would do to solve a problem using the proper vocabulary.

I *think* I'm probably looking for something vintage. Something I would simply read from and he would answer with no paper or pencil. We are continuing with BA, this is just supplemental and would probably be wrapped into our memory work not math work. Thanks in advance.

[Mrs. A]

Ray's Arithmetic might work. That's what we've been using for several years. The Primer might be a little easy if he's already in 4A, so maybe look at Intellectual Arithmetic, which is meant to be done orally all the way through. 

[Andromeda]

I use Arithmetic We Need for this purpose.

It is vintage (1950s), colorful if that matters, and has solid teaching. I have the physical copies, but most of the books are available free to download on archive.org. I linked them in the Free Curriculum and Resources thread, which is pinned at the top of the General Education forum.

Here is the grade 4 book (student edition). There are also teacher's guides with solutions and workbooks for most grades available free to download (linked in the Free Curriculum thread).

 

[katilac]

I know that the Singapore math home instructor guides used to have lots of verbal math drills in the back, not sure if that's still the case. It might be worth looking for used. 

[Slache]

8 hours ago, Mrs. A said:

Ray's Arithmetic might work. That's what we've been using for several years. The Primer might be a little easy if he's already in 4A, so maybe look at Intellectual Arithmetic, which is meant to be done orally all the way through. 

This was going to be my exact suggestion. You can get it on Google Books and add a shortcut to your phone's home screen or get it on archive and put it in a Kindle app.

[Sarah0000]

The 3-4 Ray's looks perfect for computation. Do you guys require your students to narrate what they are doing to get the answer, especially in multi step problems? Or maybe that's best left for when he's older and in the meantime perhaps just add in terminology drill?

[Slache]

1 hour ago, Sarah0000 said:

The 3-4 Ray's looks perfect for computation. Do you guys require your students to narrate what they are doing to get the answer, especially in multi step problems? Or maybe that's best left for when he's older and in the meantime perhaps just add in terminology drill?

No. I want fast mental math. I don't care beyond that.

[Mrs. A]

2 hours ago, Sarah0000 said:

The 3-4 Ray's looks perfect for computation. Do you guys require your students to narrate what they are doing to get the answer, especially in multi step problems? Or maybe that's best left for when he's older and in the meantime perhaps just add in terminology drill?

One thing I like about Ray's is how new types of oral problems are introduced with a step by step breakdown of how to go about solving them. If my kids need that breakdown we go through it and then only return to it if they start to struggle a bit. Sometimes we don't even need to cover it at all, other times we go over several problems step by step before they're able to get comfortable with that type of problem. But mostly if they're giving me correct answers I don't bother asking them how they're getting there. I find that so much oral practice really gives me a good sense of where they understand and where they struggle so it's easy to tailor our work accordingly.