heartofdakota.com

I feel like I have a perpetual struggle with math in our homeschool . I was thinking today that everything we do that's HOD is great and for the most part flows well and can be done happily and in a timely fashion. Math....not so much. We are using CLE. I tried Singapore starting in 3A I think (Bigger)and really struggled with knowing how to teach it, which is when we went to CLE. But I think all the drill has "killed" any love for math and in turn has shut off a desire to even try when the math book comes out. I'm considering Math Lessons for a Living Education. Now I realize that HOD recommends Singapore and the short lessons are one of the reasons. MLFALE also seems to have short lessons and it has narration and so it seems to have a Charlotte Mason leaning. Since I greatly respect Carrie and Julie's approach to education and am LOVING the HOD curriculum I'm very curious on y'alls (or anyone else's who's used it) opinion on MLFALE.

I can chime in here, as we have used Singapore from 2nd grade-5th. Last year I actually switched my sons to Math Living. We all liked the shorter lessons. There were less problems to do, and it seemed less stressful for my kids. In Singapore, I didn't have my sons do every problem. I think Carrie says in the guides that if your child grasps a concept, they don't need to do every problem. What has frustrated me with both maths is that more than one concept is taught before one is mastered. So this year I am using Math U See. I saw that my youngest was getting stuck in cross multiplication, yet the program was trying to move on and introduce new things, yet he was still stuck. That's also the struggle my oldest has had. He was doing division with remainders, yet was still just grasping multiplication with 3 digit numbers. So as I've researched for my boys and their learning styles, I've decided that Math U See will be a better fit for right now, so that both boys can actually master a concept fully before moving on. That's the whole driving force behind math u see. As far as comparing Singapore to living Math, honestly the only difference I noted was that there were less problems, there are stories before each new lesson (we never read them, they didn't really add to the teaching IMHO) it introduced concepts more slowly and is more kid friendly in it's design. but the approach is still the same, at least I felt that it was. My oldest said he hated math a lot less frequently last year with Living Math than he did with Singapore. HAHA! But he still hates it! He told me it's because it's hard and he doesn't feel like he completely understands all he's learning. So that's why I switched to Math u see, where we will only be working on multiplication for my youngest and fractions for my oldest, and that's it! I hope that helps some. You also may want to check out Simply Charlotte Mason math. She has a dvd that teaches you how to teach math the way Charlotte would have.