Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The new math plan

Dancer struggles with math, or so she thinks.  She is really very good at it but she hurries and make lots of little errors or misses steps.  This has dashed her confidence and so we are trying something different with her math lessons.

She uses Saxon math, which is very straight forward and the lessons are written so they are easy to understand.  I wish I had had a math book like it when I was a student.  Our new plan for math is that I will go over the lesson with her step by step and then together we will work all the problems in the lesson.  The next day she goes back and reworks the lesson.  After she is done, together we go through the next lesson.  This means that she is doing each lesson twice, once with me and once on her own, and she also does two lessons a day.

When we started doing this, we worked each and every problem together.  In the last few lessons, we have done the problems of the new concept together and then she has been confident to work the review problems on her own.  It seems that in each chapter she feeling like she can tackle more and more on her own. 

I have been anxiously awaiting the first test to see how she would do and if this is working.  It is!  She got  95% on the test and the errors she had were minor little things.  It is also helpful for me because some of her math I haven't done for over 25 years and I need a little review. 

1 comment:

Sarah Anne said...

Saxon math was the best! I used it and another program like it. I still make little mistakes though...but College Algebra is meant to mess you up. Lol.

Good luck, and good job on the test!