Math-U-See

This program has been talked about quite a bit on the message boards I frequent. It's one that has helped out school tremendously. The Decimal Street post I did March 2007, has been getting some action. First of all, Ethan Demme blogged about my blog, as well as posting comments. Then, Jodi commented on the post as well.... I feel so special to be noticed.

Really, I'm just a little lazy. It's so much easier to teach using MUS than any of the 4 programs I tried before. It's also easier to teach with materials that suit the child's needs, the way Decimal Street has done for us. BTW...Ethan said you'd need a lot of blocks to make a Decimal Street number in the thousands, but at that stage of the game, we use number cards first, then we'll use the blocks and I choose numbers that are little (in the trillions). 1,023,131,242 isn't so tough to build with the starter set of blocks and the completer set of blocks and still have blocks left over.

MUS really was the trigger for us. My dd is easily distractable, but would willing do her other school work. However, she would cry and avoid math like the plague. I switched in Oct of her 4th grade year. I found that free evaluation test really helpful. I found that while she could do all the problems, when it came to understanding them (story problems) she couldn't do it. So, I put her back a year to start MUS. Switching mid-year is perfectly acceptable as MUS allows the child to work at their own pace. Dd has gone through 2 grades of MUS in roughly a year and a half and is really understanding what she's doing. It turned our math class around.