April 2006 Archives

Whether you're a teacher, parent, or tutor, if you're considering using the Singapore Math materials, here are some helpful suggestions:

1. Regardless of which book you start with, if your child has received little instruction in metric or English measurement (weight, capacity, and length), buy the 3B home guide, text and workbook. Weeks 3 through 8 cover these in-depth. The books after 3B assume this knowledge.

Moreover, these chapters on measurement do an excellent job on reinforcing the real meaning of place value, as they offer exercises in adding and subtracting units that are other than base ten (for example, pounds and ounces.)

I was surprised to discover my children had not learned metric measurement in school. But even more of a surprise came when I discovered, during my teaching, that they had not learned English measurement, either.

I'm not sure what the reasoning was behind this, but I can imagine it might have been that this kind of learning can be incidental.

But this assumption about incidental learning can have shocking consequences, as I quickly learned that my fifth grader could not distinguish between metric and English measurement. This distinction is an assumption we might all all mistakenly make. The reality is that if it's not taught, it's not necessarily learned.

2. Don't buy books based on grade level. Chances are you'll get it wrong. Instead, follow the instructions on the Singapore Math web site to give the free pre-tests and determine proper book level. These pre-tests will determine precisely where your student needs to be.

Chances are your child will start at a fairly low level of book as compared to his grade in school, so it's perhaps best not to link the books to any grade level when speaking to your child. If he does notice, point out, truthfully, that Singapore teaches topics in a slightly different order than he may be accustomed to, and that fact accounts for why he is in a low grade level in the materials.

3. It's easy to teach math wrong, and to cause profound confusion. By reading a bit about how to think about mathematics, this can be avoided. I recommended a thorough reading and study of the book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics by Liping Ma.

4. Go to the Singapore Math site, and order ALL the manipulatives that are suggested in the Home Guides. You don't know you need them unless they're already staring you in the face on your kitchen table. And they're lifesavers.

5. The Home Guide is a modified teacher's guide that's written for homeschoolers. If you're tutoring your child at home, this is a perfect fit. And they have the answers to the exercises in the back, so don't order the answer books. It's redundant. The Home Guides are actually written by somebody at Sonlight (publishers of homeschooling materials.) They're great.

6. The Home Guides divide up the material into chunks of one week's worth. To stay organized, I called them
" modules, " and marked the start of each module in the Home Guides in red pencil so they stand out. This gives us some kind of guideline to follow.

We're doing two modules per week, which is aggressive when you consider we're doing this entirely on weekends, but it's working so far. We don't cover every exercise.

7. Hold off on buying any of the supplemental or enrichment books from the Singapore site until you've been teaching for a while. We learned that the basic books (the home guide, the text book, and the workbook) contain more than enough exercises for drill. We don't even use them all.

Linda Moran's helpful resources:

The Singapore Math lens

The Parenting Teens and Tweens lens

lens

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