I’ve never used Saxon Math which seems to be the home school standard and even more specifically the Classical home school standard. But one of the things that I’ve heard about it, is that it gives tons and tons of problems to solve on each concept.  Based on that information alone I knew Saxon was not a curriculum I would be passionate about using.

One of the things I like about home schooling my children as opposed to sending them to a public or private school is being able to cater their educations to their specific gifts, talents, interests, passions, and callings.  I’m a firm believer that everyone is made to serve different purposes with their lives and should therefore not be made to read the same books or learn things in the same way.

Another thing I like about educating my children at home is being able to spare them from wasting precious hours in the day doing busy work.  I hated it during my own schooling years when teachers would assign 100 math problems on one concept.  Once I got the concept down by problem 34 the rest of the assignment was busy work.  This type of thing occurred in my learning throughout all subjects.  The worst part was when I had several different teachers assigning busywork in each of their classes, none of them of course speaking to each other or taking in consideration how much work each of them had assigned.  Then I would be stuck with hours upon hours of homework on concepts I already understood.

What a waste of time.

Now don’t get me wrong… there is certainly a point to learning a concept and practicing it until you can do it with ease.  The problem is that for each child and in each subject the amount of work needed to be done in order to arrive at that place of ease is different.

I am only home schooling one of my three children at this point.  Remy and Llany are not yet school age and are still working on pre school core concepts like numbers, phonics, shapes, and colors.  Leo however, my oldest and therefore my home school guinea pig, is just finishing up the third grade. His advanced learning abilities are what caused me to begin home schooling in the first place.  You can read more about that here.

When I set out to begin home schooling I didn’t want to just be doing school, at home.  I wanted to take advantage of being able to handpick curriculum and teach each subject the best way possible.  I didn’t want to just get a box of assigned curriculum and start plowing through it.  I wanted to know what was out there and make a decision about what sounded best for my son’s abilities and my teaching style.  One of the books that was instrumental in helping me do this was “The Well Trained Mind” by Susan Wise Bauer.  This book breaks down some of the different curriculum philosophies and explains their strengths and focuses.  When looking through the math section of this book, Singapore Math was the curriculum that appealed to me the most for three reasons.

1. I’ve always heard that Asian countries have a reputation for high achievement in math amongst students, far higher than the abilities of American students, so a curriculum from Singapore sounded like a better idea than an American curriculum.
2. The focus in Singapore Math is on Mental Math and that is something I wish I had been taught how to do better… I’m still tempted to count on my fingers.
3. Singapore Math does not require incessant amounts of problems to work through in each chapter.  This is perfect for an advanced learner like Leo who picks up new concepts with great ease and grows bored quickly if not challenged with moving forward. There are however additional “Extra Practice” books available at each grade level for when extra practice on a particular concept is needed.

I figured if the curriculum seemed to move too fast or leave out fundamental elements, we would go back to something like Saxon or Math U See. I’m glad to report however that we haven’t needed to change our Math curriculum at all over the past three years, and we will continue with Singapore Math again next year for fourth grade because we love it!

Leo continues to score WAY above grade level in Mathematics. Last year his National Percentile Rank (NPR) for the California State STAR testing in Math was in the 98th percentile.

Now again I will state: the same books and approaches to learning are not equally effective for every student, nor are they equally friendly for every parent or teacher’s, teaching style. I have overheard parent conversations ranting and raving about how much they hate Singapore Math, so I know it doesn’t work for everyone.

But… it works for Leo and me, and here’s why:

An Emphasis on Mental Math

I used manipulatives in pre school with Leo while we were learning to count, add, and subtract. I didn’t order some fancy color coded set of manipulatives and curriculum for this. We simply counted fish crackers, legos, cookies, jelly beans, and whatever else we were playing with or eating. Once we started with Singapore Math we didn’t use manipulatives at all anymore, but instead moved easily into the intermediary pictorial stage.

In Singapore Math at the elementary level, there isn’t a big emphasis on using  manipulatives.  Being someone who still depended on her fingers for counting well into adulthood, I liked the idea of being able to find a math program that would force my son, from the beginning, to see numbers in his head and be able to do tricks with them in order to solve problems without the crutch of manipulatives.

Illustrations with a Purpose

Singapore math books don’t look like the typical math texts we grew up with. They are filled with cartoon type color illustrations that I love. I don’t know about you, but just opening up a Saxon text book with a white page filled from top to bottom with as many little black numbers as will fit on the page, makes me woozy. I can’t imagine how it must make a six year old feel!

When I ordered our first Singapore Math book for Kindergarten with Leo when he was four, he picked up the books himself and asked if we could get started because to him they looked like a lot of fun. But Singapore Math’s illustrations are not purely for entertainment, there is a very logical and helpful purpose behind them.

One of the problems with other math curriculums in the U.S. is that they leap from using concrete objects or manipulatives in the early stages, right into abstract mental math calculations. Many students struggle with this leap as I did, and therefore continue to secretly count on fingers or calculate with physical tapping, in order to keep up, never developing true mental math abilities.

Singapore math textbooks include an intermediary pictorial stage. By looking at pictures of concrete objects being divided equally, students form a mental image of what adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, and other mathematical processes look like. When they finally get to abstract calculation, they have already internalized and visualized the process.

Additionally, the illustrations are so helpful that this year at age 8, while in the 3^rd grade, my son was able to teach himself several of the lessons without any parent involvement at all, and that is a BIG PART of my goal in choosing to home school – to teach my children, how to teach themselves… for LIFE!

Also as a home school parent, while being supplied with such great illustrative examples of each math concept, I have never needed to do any prep work in order to take my son through a Singapore math lesson (except for gathering some measuring supplies when learning about length, weight, and volume.)  And that fits my teaching style to a “T.” Very little prep… lot’s of hands on learning, questioning, and finding answers together. The Singapore Math lessons are easy to just sit down and go through together at any time. (And… they’ve really helped me to improve in my own mental math abilities.)

Introducing Mathematical Concepts Early

At the first grade level Singapore Math introduces addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, fractions, time, length, geometry, and on and on the list goes. Instead of waiting to introduce mathematical concepts at later stages, Singapore Math introduces nearly all basic concepts in the same year, and then each year of study advances the child’s understanding and ability in each area.

As a home school teacher I can’t comprehend how you teach addition but put off teaching multiplication for later years when all it is, is a way of adding groups quickly. Or why you would teach division but keep fractions a secret until fourth grade. Or talk about shapes and their names at age four, but wait to talk about the different names of triangles until middle school. Or how you teach any of if without introducing the algebraic concept of solving for “x” which is what we are all doing every day when we use math in real life. All of these ideas can be taught to a first grade student when done with simplicity of small numbers and done in the context of real world problem solving.

Word Problems

Isn’t the real reason we learn math for problems like, “If I’ve made 24 cupcakes in the last hour, but I need to make 700 cupcakes for the school play by tomorrow morning at 11am, and Johnny only gave me this AWESOME news ten minutes ago and it’s 8pm, how many hours and how many ovens will it take me to make the rest of my cupcakes and will I get any sleep tonight?” So why do other curriculums make this kind of math question a side-note instead of a central theme?

Singapore Math puts a huge emphasis on what we call “Word Problems,” and it doesn’t push off learning word problems to the end of lessons or for higher grade levels. In Singapore Math, word problems are part of the core curriculum in every chapter of every year of math study… and there is an extremely GOOD reason for this! What we should really call “Word Problems” is “Life Problems.” And aren’t “Life Problems” a huge practical reason for learning math in the first place?

Each grade level of curriculum not only includes word problems in the chapters, but also an additional optional “Word Problems” book made up entirely of just that… Word Problems. Also included at each grade level is an optional Extra Practice Book to reinforce math processes, and a Test Book that can be used for extra practice or quizzing students. With all of these extra optional resources that can be used, you can’t say Singapore Math doesn’t offer PLENTY of individual problems in order to master concepts. But…the fact that these problems come in separate books allows them to more freely be optional for the students that need them.

Extra practice books can be

1) Used with chapters that need more attention in a challenging area of study and

2) Completely ignored with chapters where concepts were easily mastered in the main text

Conclusion

Cracking open a Singapore Math book is something both my son and I look forward to and we have a great time going through the lessons together.

One of the greatest things about teaching home school is the fact that you get to choose what works best for you and your family so I’m not plugging Singapore Math as the “Be-all, end all” of math curriculums. It’s simply the one that works for us, and if you are looking into teaching Home School or are already home schooling, but haven’t yet found a Math curriculum you and your children love, consider giving Singapore Math a try!

To learn more about Singapore Math and to read a fantastic Blog post written by an American public school Math Teacher who has adopted Singapore Math, and see a YouTube video about other public schools adopting the curriculum, click here.

Also, visit the Singapore Math curriculum website where we order our materials.

And if you’ve used Singapore Math, whether you’ve loved it or hated it, tell us about it in the comments, and tell us “Why?” More input from more sources is welcomed and appreciated here!

Be sure to check out MY post about the importance of overcoming your own personal Math hangups and shortcoming, in order to better encourage your children to succeed in all areas of academics and in life – How Is Your Child’s World Being Framed?

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