It’s been interesting to have the kids in school and learn that they’re strong math students.  I don’t push my kids to be academic superstars by any means; I’m pretty relaxed in general in my approach.  My goal is that they have solid skills in a few key areas, one of which is math and we do this by systematically working through the program of our choice.

We’ve used Singapore math with great success through the elementary years, and they have this in Israel as well (as I was pleasantly surprised to learn when I saw it on the book list from a school ds7 interviewed at last year).  We had tried Saxon before then and it’s a good solid program, but it wasn’t what we needed for the elementary years.

For high school, we’ve used a number of things (to be more accurate, my oldest who was the guinea pig got to try a number of things).  When I’m evaluating math programs, I’m looking for something that can be used as a self-teaching text and will result in a student who has a strong grasp of the skills being covered (assuming the effort is put in by the student). I don’t want my older kids waiting around for me to be available to explain something to them, particularly since as they get higher up in math I need more time to figure things out myself before explaining it to them.  There are lots of great programs out there and everything we used was good; it’s just a question of finding what works for your family.

We started with New Elementary Math, Singapore’s program for post elementary students and that didn’t go well.  Then we went on to Teaching Textbooks, which initially I was happy with.  Then I got the sense that it wasn’t a very rigorous program – my impression was that it’s good for students who are weak mathematically.   We moved on to The Life of Fred.  Interesting but it didn’t seem thorough enough.  (Since it’s been a while, I don’t remember the specific details regarding each program, but I did a lot of research on each at the time.)

Then we moved on to Video Text, which I was very , very happy with.  The main downside of this program is that it’s very expensive; I bought it used so I paid about half price, $300 at the time.  The algebra program includes three years of math – prealgebra, algebra 1 and algebra 2 so it wasn’t nearly as expensive as it seems.   What I like about programs like this is that your child can watch a lesson with a very good math teacher explaining all of the points very clearly, and can rewatch it to repeat points that weren’t clear.  What I don’t like is that if the disc becomes damaged (which in my house is inevitable), you have to buy a new one.  I brought this along with us to Israel, bringing the unit ds12 was up to and packing away the rest to be sent with my mother’s lift that arrived ten months later.  The only problem was I brought the unit he had just finished, not the one he was about to start – not so helpful!

Since I brought along a few Saxon tests, ds was able to use Saxon Algebra 1/2 (though for the first year he had so much going on that there was no extra head space for doing math after school hours).  This also works as a self-teaching text, as ado re all of the Saxon texts from 54 and on.  Then I got a free four month trial of a program called yourteacher.com; it was the duration of this past summer and I optimistically set up accounts for a few of the kids, but only ds13 used it.  I heard him recently speaking to a friend on the phone who needs some math help, telling him that this program was really good.  So when I saw that a free four month trial is being offered again, I signed up once more.  I also signed up for a free year’s trial of  hotmath.com, to check out what it’s like.  (I took advantage of both of these free offers through http://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org; it’s free to sign up and then there are lots of discounts on curriculum purchased through the co-op.)

Another free resource that you don’t have to sign up for is Khan Academy, that has online videos of many topics broken down into short lessons.  Many lessons are being translated into different languages, one of which is Hebrew.  My kids didn’t use this much because they had math programs they were happy with, but it’s a great resource that I’ll probably use with someone at some time.

If you have math resources that you love, feel free to share about them with us!

Avivah