For the last six months or so we’ve been going through Earlybird Kindergarten Math Textbook A at our boy’s own pace, and now we’re almost done. In some way our experience is not unlike the experience of our using the flash cards (“Fleschcards”) I made for him. In both cases, in the beginning he was very enthusiastic. Then in both cases his interest waned and went out. So we stopped for a few days or weeks. Then we tried again later, and he was always game to get back into it at least for a little bit…except when he wasn’t…in which case we stopped again.
Lately, especially since the length & size unit, he been very excited about math. He suggests it every 2nd or 3rd day, if I don’t suggest it, and when I suggest it he says “yes” about half the time.
This might seem strange to Doman parents, since Textbook A doesn’t even include addition, let alone counting above 10. What it does, instead, is systematically introduce matching and sorting, numbers to 5 and then 10 (much of this we skipped), order, shapes, patterns, length & size, weight, capacity, and finally comparing sets. Addition begins basically at the beginning of Textbook B, and then goes through multiple different ways to think about addition. The point of all the preliminary stuff is to help the child to understand what is actually going on when you add and subtract. It’s one thing to be able to mechanically do addition problems (or do them using subitizing). He could do simple addition problems before we started Textbook A. But I think it’s another thing to understand what’s happening, and even if it seems too simple or “remedial” to do things like matching and sorting, I really don’t think it is. Or, if it is, you can do what we’ve done and skip pages that really do seem too easy. There are some things, like comparing sizes of sets (is there a different chair for each different student?) that you might think are (1) too simple and (2) too boring, but FWIW my boy was pretty interested and seemed to be learning something.
There are instructions for hands-on activities (meant to be performed by a whole classroom–easily enough adapted for a one-on-one home schooling situation), and these were as important as and more than the contents of the pages. Of course, for this group, which is familiar with the benefits of the Montessori approach to math, this should be no surprise.
I’ll be very interested to see whether he continues his interest into Textbook B, when we start doing addition and subtraction. I think so, because actually the parts in Textbook A where he got most frustrated was where we probably should have skipped ahead more–it was boring because it was too easy. But I figured that out and we do skip as necessary now.
One worry I have about this particular series is that Textbook B covers the stuff in the next standard book in the general Singapore Math series, Primary Mathematics 1A. With that overlap, I wonder if we shouldn’t just skip Textbook B and go on to Primary Mathematics 1A. There’s even overlap between Texbook B and Primary Mathematics 1B. Yep I think we might just skip Textbook B and go on, because of the overlap, but I really don’t know.
For that matter, I guess it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to have begun with Primary Mathematics 1A. I considered that, but some of those Kindergarten Math Textbook A topics seemed (and still seem) like very sound preparations… But as you can see, I’m still thinking through all this stuff myself.
