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Curriculum Pick: Math

Grade 5

This year we are trying Beast Academy for River. Have you heard of it? The textbooks are written as comic books, with separate workbooks for practice. The textbooks must be somewhat entertaining, given that my daughter has already read the first one several times over. We haven’t tried the practice books yet; I’ve heard that they’re pretty tricky. From what I’ve read, the curriculum doesn’t start with basic questions and then become progressively harder — it just uses hard questions with a smattering of extra difficult ones. It’s kind of like throwing your kid in the deep end to teach her how to swim. Which is a terrible approach, really. But that’s what we’re doing with math. It’s a bit of a strange choice, I think, given that we’re behind in math, but I almost wonder if River fights math lessons because she’s bored. I’m going to see if this is more engaging — I’ll be sure to update you as we go through the books.

If Beast Academy doesn’t work for us, we’ll go back to a mix of RightStart (River’s choice) and Math Mammoth (my choice). We did this combination last year and I thought the two curriculums worked beautifully together. When I needed to step away from the more teacher-intensive RS, I printed off units from MM and told her to finish them over a week or so. She didn’t love the assignments, but man, oh man, I loved the break it gave me.

Grade 1

For Harbour, we’re going to use RightStart Level A. Honestly I would have held off on anything formal until Grade 2 or even 3, but she keeps asking to do math lessons, so I might as well use what we’ve got.

Pre-School

Forest will continue to learn to count by adding up the number of Made Good bars that he wants to eat. So far he knows “two of them” and “all of them.” I keep my math skills fresh by mentally calculating how much sugar he’s getting when he eats three bars in one sitting. Oh good gravy, that’s not healthy at all.

Jump Ahead: Our Curriculum Pick for 2017/2018

Introduction
Math: Beast Academy and RightStart
Language Arts: Barefoot Ragamuffin and Brave Writer curriculums
History: Wayfarers: Ancient History
Geography: Wayfarers: Ancient History
Science: Science in the Ancient World
Bible: Episcopal Children’s Curriculum
Foreign Languages: Speaking French with Miss Mason and François and Latin for Children
Miscellaneous: Wayfarers: Ancient History