Marilyn Burns Math Materials...

[Heathermomster]

Are the Marilyn Burns math materials helpful for kiddos with maths SLDs?  A link follows: https://www.amazon.com/Marilyn-Burns/e/B000APO7K4.

Has anyone used them?  If so, do you recommend them?  Would you mind providing a review?

I see her books cover fractions.

Thanks,

Heather

 

 

 

[PeterPan]

Who is this for? Your ds is in college, so it's for your dd? Yes, in general MB is sort of your guru figure. Your library may have some of her stuff. When the reviews will say it's like having a conversation with her, it REALLY IS, oh my. For me it's this overwhelming flood of verbosity and I'm like pu-lease could you just get the to the point and flow-chart it cuz I don't have time for this.

I have a bunch of her books from the Math By All Means series. I did some stuff with ds, started some stuff. I think Ronit Bird is a clearer thinker. Here's a sample of something I found when I was trying to find samples of her arithmetic multiplying/dividing fractions book. It sounds sorta fine and it made me think, but it's not TRUSTWORTHY because she still isn't thinking clearly. Ronit Bird tells us to teach multiplication as scaling, not repeated addition. And when we hit that, I was like wow RB is so OCD/nitpicky, lol. But now read what MB is suggesting as an explanation and how she has to jump through hoops (because she explains multiplication as repeated addition) and then think about how you could extend RB's concept of scaling and make the presentation more elegant and simple. Same stuff, just nuances.

https://store.mathsolutions.com/pub/media/documents/doc/0-941355-64-0_L.pdf  

[Heathermomster]

Thanks for this...

I feel like there is a disconnect in solid, novel remedial math materials between the basic 4 functions and algebra. I was thinking about fractions mainly.  

[PeterPan]

Have you seen RB's new fractions ebook? Really though, I think her ideas on multiplication from the multiplication ebook are foundational. She approaches it as scaling, and that sets fractions up to work better. I've got a bunch of things on fractions right now (the RB ebook, advanced pattern blocks book, HOE fractions kit, RightStart fractions, etc.) and we seem to have gotten a lot of mileage from our simple RightStart hardwood fractions puzzle and just playing war and talking about them. We did it for months upon months. We'd draw two cards, form a fraction, find it on the hardwood fractions puzzle, compare, rinse repeat. Then we started talking about what it was close to (rounding, estimating), how close it was to the other person's fraction, what would happen if we wanted to make it another way, etc. 

The thing probably holding my ds up is that he doesn't yet know his multiplication facts, oops. We're working on them super slowly, haha. But as far as just understanding fractions, reducing, adding with unlike denominators, etc., he's already there (to the limits of how far you get when you're slow from not knowing your multiplication facts) and all we did was play war and keep talking. I have a couple kits I picked up from Lakeshore Learning on clearance, fractions for 5th and 6th I think. They have problems to work through the basic stuff. I figure when we're ready to do something that looks like typical do problems math, we'll work through those kits. We finished the kit for multi-digit addition and that worked out really well, and now we're doing the subtraction kit. We just do a few problems each day (mental and written) and he's doing well. 

I'm not wanting to rush the multiplication because he just BARELY has the concept in his mind already. I think his last growth spurt got him there, where scaling and having multiples OF something finally makes sense. Or it was the language work. Or God had pity on me. I don't know, lol. Now I have an open door and we're just working on it a bit at a time along with everything else. It will probably be next school year before we do traditional written fraction math with the kits, because I still have the multiplication and division kits to get through. But who knows, we may diverge just for the fun of it. Fractions are way more fun than division anyways, my lands. Actually I just realized I need to drill him on his subtractions facts. I drilled addition but never subtraction. He gets it and gets there, but a little drilling would get him the rest of the way. He keeps squirming about his subtraction, and that's why, oops. Solvable problem.

I don't know how the RightStart fractions stuff will be. I've got it, and of course we had waited FOREVER for Cotter to come out with it. For the lower levels, RightStart was definitely too fast and not to intervention depth (tedium, detail) that my ds needed. But the fractions might be. And I'm more confident now about blending things because I know how he learns. 

Here are some links

Mastering Fractions Hands-On Kit - Gr. 5 I'm not seeing the other gr I bought, only this one. 

Multiplying Fractions Hands-On Student Pack these are kind of cool (I have a bigger pack) and this individual student size is gobs

Decimal Place Value Cards I don't have these yet, but I want them. 

Factor Triangles for fun to reinforce multiplication, which of course you need like super crazy for factoring with fractions. (LCD, GCF)

https://rightstartmath.com/?s=fractions  Dr. Cotter on fractions

RightStart™ Fractions Kit  Here's the whole kit, but look at the components. They no longer sell the fractions puzzle, but they have a magnetic version of it you might like. Notice what makes it distinctive, that it has ALL the parts, 1-10, not skipping 7, etc. This is what I was using with our war game. Now the kit includes some fraction card decks, etc. to play more games. RS will have tons of games and they'll all be fun and instructive. I just needed to make things MEAN something, so I needed to live at that super simple level a long time. We probably played just a really basic war (turn 2 cards, form a fraction, talk about how many pieces are in the whole and how many of them you have, etc.) for MONTHS. Then we expanded and I would ask more questions (what if you wanted to change the part size and have 8 parts to the whole instead of 4, now what would your fraction be, etc.). After many months, he realized he could put the bigger number on top and form an improper fraction and be more likely to win, haha. I just kept talking and planting seeds. (If I wanted half of what I scored, then what would it be, etc.)

http://www.borenson.com/Products/DevelopingFractionsSenseStudentWorkbookA/tabid/1636/Default.aspx We've been working through this, and honestly it's pretty redundant after everything else we did. It was kind of fun at first, but we'll see if we finish. It's fine, and it pushed us into good territory with connecting fractions to a number line. With ds I always need to do a concept lots of ways, so it was good for that. 

http://www.didax.com/advanced-pattern-block-book-gr-5-8.html  I think I may have gotten this from Rainbow Resource, don't remember. I know I went through their site and basically looked at everything they sell for fractions, lol. It's really fun, and in theory if you want to make the effort you can extend it to fractions. We're doing it just because it's crazy fun and it's good to have fun math in the mix. The fractions stuff is clearly there, yeah, definitely, and they try to get you to flesh it out and see it, yes. It's worth doing just for what it is, probably the most fun math we've done.

[PeterPan]

And if you want to get the Marilyn Burns stuff, get it!! It's fine! I just keep spending so much money, lol. But yeah it's fine. She just tends to be really chatty and she's not as thorough and thought out as Ronit Bird. Your engineering soul may go oh my lands why did I buy this... They'll spend a whole book (MB stuff) and it might be like 5 lessons. And you're like my lands, that's not enough bang for my buck, a whole book ought to have 30-60 lessons! Nope, this is ps stuff and she's trying to teach teachers how to talk, how to interact with the kids, who to elicit different solutions from a whole group, blah blah. There will be tons of examples. It will just ramble on. But in between all that, the meat will be good, sure.

So yeah, buy 'em and send the whole stack to me when you're done. 

[Kanin]

I actually really like the verbosity of Marilyn Burns 🙂 It helps me to read actual conversations between student/teacher (though they're likely made up), like how the Lindamood-Bell stuff has actual conversations. It helps me picture what's going to happen. 

 

[PeterPan]

36 minutes ago, Mainer said:

I actually really like the verbosity of Marilyn Burns 🙂 It helps me to read actual conversations between student/teacher (though they're likely made up), like how the Lindamood-Bell stuff has actual conversations. It helps me picture what's going to happen. 

 

Hahahaha, that totally makes sense! And I didn't mean it to be a knock, more like informative. It drives me cu-ra-zy. But I've known other people who loved MB too and probably for that same reason. 

[Kanin]

4 hours ago, PeterPan said:

Hahahaha, that totally makes sense! And I didn't mean it to be a knock, more like informative. It drives me cu-ra-zy. But I've known other people who loved MB too and probably for that same reason. 

Also, I probably have more free time than you 😋