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My daughter hates math, what can I do?


Janeway
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My daughter, 4th grade, hates math. She is not the worst at it or anything. We tried TGTB new math this year and I have no clue why she does not like it. It is pretty and colorful and all. But nope. She is very disappointed and really does not like it. 

She likes to play games and such. But I am not thinking that changing courses and investing in Right Start would help because it seems at her level, it has less games and more handwork anyway. I do not want to spend a bunch of money. And she says she would rather return to Singapore Math than continue TGTB so maybe we will just do that. But it would be great if I could find hands on activities and games and keep her worksheet type work to a limit, and maybe even just on the board.

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I don't have any experience of 4th grade maths but your description of games and activities with fewer worksheets made me think of Moving Beyond the page. You can buy their maths units as individual online units (I just cut and paste them into a word document then print them out) for $7.50.

Each unit finishes with a fun hands on project like make your own board game or make a museum display. 

I like to pair our MBTP units with Math Mammoth for extra practice. 

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You don't have to change course.

So, I have a policy of splitting a math lesson between hands on and reinforcement.  You can take a look at the lesson, figure out the objectives for it, and make most of it an activity.  There are plenty of ideas online for teaching every concept.

For example, the math lesson I am building right now is working on 3 things:
-dividing shapes into fractions
-dividing numbers to show a fraction of that whole number
-identifying more/less than (comparing fractions)

I took 3 sheets of construction paper and 1 sheet of white paper.  The white paper went through the printer so I could have 1 inch squares on it.  The construction paper was cut into squares, rectangles, circles and triangles.

The first part of the lesson will be folding shapes/drawing lines and using chips to identify 1/4, 1/2, 1/3, 2/4, 3/4...and so on.

The second part will be folding rectangles made from the inch graph paper and coloring/writing the number of squares colored over the number of total squares.

The third part will be using the shapes to compare like shapes: 2 circles and comparing half to two-thirds, for example.

This is easily a written lesson from one of their books.  But it doesn't have to be.

Another one I'm making is using flash cards they already have for multiplication.  I'm printing out a multiplication chart with all the numbers mixed up.  Each gets a chance to turn over a card and say the product/find it on the board. The first to get tic-tac-toe with their markers wins. Easy, quick way to work on math facts.

 

All it takes is a few minutes for me to google a topic and then set it up in a way that works here.  MEP puzzles are great, CSMP worksheets are fun, Education Unboxed has stuff along with MathForLove, Math Salamander and a ton of other places.

 

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And just for an amusing note: my daughter hated math in the fourth grade. But of course she had to do it. And we used Saxon -- why, because I had it and this was my last child. She was not bad at it, she just hated it.

Fast forward -- she has just started her senior year at college and is a math major. She loves math, but not fourth grade math. She started loving math when she began calculus.

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When my dd was at that middle stage of math that is kind of boring I would try to find pizzazzy things to add on. Hands On Equations, a supplemental workbook of enrichment or more challenging application, AOPS word problems, whatever. Didax makes a lot of cool workbooks that you can download on the uber cheap or find used. They have dice games, fraction tiles books, etc. I did one a couple years ago with ds that I really liked. For a bright 4th grader look at the books marked for gr6-8. 

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7 hours ago, LinRTX said:

And just for an amusing note: my daughter hated math in the fourth grade. But of course she had to do it. And we used Saxon -- why, because I had it and this was my last child. She was not bad at it, she just hated it.

Fast forward -- she has just started her senior year at college and is a math major. She loves math, but not fourth grade math. She started loving math when she began calculus.

Elementary school math is a serious drag, lol. I definitely tried to spice it up in our house. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

My DD hated math by 5th grade but we kept at it and used Saxon the whole way with Saxon Teacher CDs (she loves Art Reed DVDs we added in in middle school) and she scored the highest possible score 99 percentile on standardized testing year after year and high on the math ACT. 

They don't have to like it, they just have to know math!

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