Math and homeschool

Not quite yet, but soon! Next week we start up school again. We are fortunate that we've always homeschooled, so are able to keep doing our normal school routine without any changes. But I know that a lot of my friends are homeschooling for the first time this year and have been asking what we use for curriculum, so I thought I'd do a few blog posts running down the different subjects (and maybe a grand finale of our homeschool philosophy. I'm guessing you'll figure out what that is if you read the posts.)

Math was, surprisingly!, the hardest curriculum for me to find. We have all sorts of abilities in all the different subjects between our 8 kids (sort of like an actual classroom, right?) So we've tried a few different curriculums for math and settled on one we love.

(Click on the picture for a link) Christian Light Education has worked GREAT for both my kids who struggle with math, and those who just cruise through it. I have a couple kids who struggled to retain information. This is considered a "spiral" program, meaning you just keep spiraling through the material and reviewing it, rather than learning it once and hoping you master and remember it forever. :)

It's a Mennonite curriculum with a lot of word problems and real world applications built in right away from the early years. They also work in some geography and studies about other cultures which is fun. Being a Mennonite company, they do not have their website available for sales on Sundays, so plan your ordering accordingly. The review can get lengthy, so for my kids, they will do a new lesson each day, and I may cross out some of the review problems if it's something they have a good handle on. For my kids who are ready to move at a faster pace, they will do two or three new lessons a day, but then only one of the review sections. (Did you know you're allowed to skip pages in the workbooks and textbooks when you homeschool? It blew my mind trying to grasp that idea when we first started homeschooling 11 years ago!) Christian Light math is sometimes referred to as a "gentle" curriculum, which is one of my favorite things about it. Rather than teach a full concept in one day, then review it for a week, only part of the new concept is taught each day. So each new skill or concept is broken down into manageable pieces. It's also meant to be self-taught with just a little help from parents in the later grades. This DEFINITELY varies depending on the child, but for the most part, my kids get pretty independent with it by middle school. I know math is one of the more daunting subjects to think about teaching, but it helps me to remember that I don't have to know calculus. I don't even have to understand next week's lesson. I only need to be one lesson ahead of my kids. So I learn it along with them. I didn't have to jump in remembering everything from high school math, I was able to start with kindergarten and work my way through reviewing every grade level, ha! But if you find yourself having to suddenly jump into high school math, there are Youtube videos which are fantastic for teaching the concepts. So you can teach yourself, then teach your child, or you can both learn it together. I, for one, am better at fractions than I have ever been in my life. :)