Math for next year....CLE again or Math Mammoth?

[christinebrick]

Good afternoon!  Looking ahead to next year, I'm trying to decide if I want to go ahead with CLE 3 or switch to Math Mammoth for my daughter.  CLE has worked pretty well for us this year, but it hasn't been without struggles.  I like the spiral so she gets lots of review and nothing gets forgotten, really like the focus on memorizing facts, but it seems like the practice problems on new concepts are so few that she never fully "gets" the concepts and doesn't always remember how to do them when it comes up in review...sometimes even much later. And it also seems like she has trouble if the problems aren't EXACTLY like how they are shown in the examples.  She understands the procedures if they are "just so," but I think struggles with the actual concepts and the why. 

 

I ran into Math Mammoth when I was looking for supplements for some of the things she's still struggling with, but then I got to thinking more about using it as our main curriculum next year, although I know that mastery style programs bother her because if she doesn't catch on right away she gets really, really frustrated, which is part of why the spiral seems to work for her. I realize that I could do CLE and supplement (as I am doing now, not with Math Mammoth, just other worksheets/videos/manipulatives), but I have 4 other younger kids so I'm really trying to simplify if possible.  And Homeschool Planet has the Math Mammoth lesson plans. 👏 

 

I'm not sure if my rambling is making any sense.  😅 Those that have used Math Mammoth, how does it prepare kids for middle/high school math?  Have you always used it? If not, what did you use before and why did you switch? Where (if anywhere) do you feel it is lacking?  I've looked over the samples but I've been pulled in before by samples that I really got excited about and turned out to be total flops for us lol.  And I know that it's probably more dependent on *me* and my teaching than the curriculum (it's a tool, not the master, etc.), but I didn't/don't have a solid math foundation and so I need a little more help for this subject. I'm also going to *try,* realizing that it may not be possible, to use the same curriculum, at least in the early years, for all of my kids, and in that sense Math Mammoth would be a great investment!  I do think that CLE is a good program, and we've had a lot of success in some areas with it, but there's still a lot of frustration/fighting tears involved sometimes that I could do without.  Does anyone have any experiences or advice to help me think it through?

[Paige]

I think MM is a good program. For most students, I'd prefer to use it over CLE, but CLE was good for a few of my kids.

But if you expect less tears with MM then I think you'll be disappointed. 

They used to have some pretty significant samples or cheap chapters of MM you could buy. I'd get one of those to go through over the summer and see how it goes. If she's having a lot of issues with frustration, it may not be the curricula as much as personality or that she needs more support. I might back down a half step for a while and build some confidence with games and fun things. You can also adapt MM to be completely on a white board or orally which can help. She's so young that my priority would be on keeping her confidence up.

[McSalty]

We just switched from MM to CLE. 

I thought MM would be a good fit as it’s pretty aligned with what my kids were doing in the public school. 

We did the whole workbook for 4A so I can say we gave it a good trial. It was not a good fit for my children in the end. The busy pages even started to drive me up the wall. My main issue was the child was shown on the 1st page how to work the concept. There was a small section where the problems were worked the same way as the example. After that the concept was the same but the problems looked completely different. There is a strong focus on mental math and the word problems really made them think which I liked. I did not want to give up on this program as I invested in the PDFs through 7th grade, but live and learn  🙂

We are half way through book 2 of CLE now and so far so good. Even my non-mathy kid isn’t complaining about math everyday anymore. I have been supplementing with MM word problems as I don’t find the ones in CLE challenging enough for my kids. I would suggest just ordering 1 workbook and trying it out. Some kids just love it and I really wish it would have worked for us. 

[Emily ZL]

Yeah, it makes sense to first do a placement test and get one workbook. In my case, I was able to catch a sale, so I got the whole 1-7 curriculum for under $100. I was looking to make a curriculum switch after Beast Academy was a bad fit for my oldest child (he is good in math but hates puzzles) and Singapore was too teacher-heavy for my youngers. The pdf version includes the main worktexts, answers, tests, extra drill, etc. I figured that even if I only used it as a supplement here and there, with 6 kids, it was bound to be a good investment for at least some math topics. 

Things I like and don't --

- there are lots of problems, and she says most kids should do about half. Don't try to assign all of them unless needed

- I don't think it's too busy, but getting it in color helps a lot. If it doesn't look like there's much room to calculate, that's often because she does a lot of mental math

- She explains things many different ways. This is good if your child struggles with one way of teaching, but it can also confuse the child. I usually just figure that out and skip that -- like one of mine hates number lines, so I skip those.

- I like the mastery approach, but she does about 4 subjects per book, so it's more spiral and reviewing than you'd think. If you get sick of a longer unit, she recommends just switching back and forth; most of them (like geometry, time and money, etc.) can be mixed.

That's it really. I feel like it's really solid. I think it might be harder to come to it later without having built a foundation, since she will expect them to do some mental math tricks, etc. But probably a placement test can help with that.

 

[knitgrl]

I have no experience with CLE, but have switched to MM for ds, because he is more of a git'er done kid. I would say what Emily ZL said is right on target. I sit with him while he does it, and we skip about a third of the questions, or half of them if he is solid on a concept. It takes us 15-20 minutes for two pages, which is about all his attention span can handle.

[Servant4Christ]

I haven't used MM, but have 3.5 years of experience using CLE with my oldest DS. My responses in the thread I'll link below may help you. Sorry, I don't have time to post all the issues I had with CLE but yours sound similar to the ones we had. If I could, I'd find you the threads from a couple years ago when I was pulling my hair out in frustration over CLE math. It works well for so many, just not us. 

 

[Momto6inIN]

On 4/15/2021 at 7:38 PM, Emily ZL said:

 

Things I like and don't --

- there are lots of problems, and she says most kids should do about half. Don't try to assign all of them unless needed

- I don't think it's too busy, but getting it in color helps a lot. If it doesn't look like there's much room to calculate, that's often because she does a lot of mental math

- She explains things many different ways. This is good if your child struggles with one way of teaching, but it can also confuse the child. I usually just figure that out and skip that -- like one of mine hates number lines, so I skip those.

- I like the mastery approach, but she does about 4 subjects per book, so it's more spiral and reviewing than you'd think. If you get sick of a longer unit, she recommends just switching back and forth; most of them (like geometry, time and money, etc.) can be mixed.

That's it really. I feel like it's really solid. I think it might be harder to come to it later without having built a foundation, since she will expect them to do some mental math tricks, etc. But probably a placement test can help with that.

 

Exactly this.

It's an amazing program and my kids are SOLID on math when they're done with it. The visual way they explain negative numbers is great conceptually and when they learn long division it's so incremental and they learn exactly why they're doing what they're doing at every step that by the time she's done examining then long division is a snap!

BUT ... There's a lot on the page. It can be overwhelming. We started it when my DS was in 6th (coming right out of public school) and it was a disaster for him because he wasn't used to learning math this way. But for my next 3 girls it's been amazing.