Dreams and Designs (Finishing Treehouse Review Week)

Treehouse Review Week

I'm going to finish out this Review Week by mentioning an e-book that nobody asked me to review--I just liked it and wanted to pass it on.

The title is Dreams and Designs: Homemade Supplies to Complement Your Homeschool, and it's by Donna Campos. This is one of the freebies you can get when you register for the TOS Homeschool Expo. And since the price of the e-book is US$12.45, and the cost of the conference is only $19.99 through March 31st, you're almost as far ahead to register for the conference and get the e-book plus a bunch of other downloadable goodies. Have I sold y'all on that yet?

Anyway, Expo or not, this is seriously one of the better e-books I've seen. I like resources that make homeschoolers' job easier instead of harder, and this is one of those resources. Without giving away everything that's in it, it is packed full of clever stuff that would actually work for a lot of homeschoolers, that might save you money instead of getting you to spend more, and that makes good use of easy-to-get materials.

I also really like things that fold flat. Sample idea from the book: using trifold presentation boards as a morning-opening-type calendar/weather/etc. board. More ideas: how to improvise felt boards and quite a few things to do with index cards. There's an 8-page sample here.

As I said, you can order this through TOS Magazine's Schoolhouse Store, at the link above; or you can get it as part of your virtual conference freebie package. Either way, this one's a cut above the ordinary.

Critical Thinking's Balance Benders (TOS Review)

Treehouse Review Week

This has been a pretty quiet "Review Week" so far--I have some new products, but we're not quite ready to post about all of them yet.

Here's one we've been using for the last couple of weeks:

Balance Benders from The Critical Thinking Co.

When I heard that the Review Crew would get to try out products from Critical Thinking, I didn't know if we'd get math, logic or something more unexpected. Balance Benders is kind of all three. We were sent the Beginning Level, aimed at grades 2-6; there are three more difficult levels covering grades 4-12+, 6-12+, and 8-12+. (That's typical of Critical Thinking's books--many of them come in several levels but get more challenging within each book.)

What I discovered is that these are what our family has always called "yogurt cup problems." This dates way back to The Apprentice's first year using Miquon Math, when I rigged up a balance made from yogurt cups. The idea was to play around with combinations of Cuisenaire rods and small objects, learning concepts such as "what you do to one side, you have to do to the other." Our balance never did work perfectly, but it was enough to get the point across, and the name has stuck. In the Miquon series you also get worksheets that show combinations of balls and cubes; you have to figure out things like if one big ball equals four small balls, and one cube equals two big balls, how many small balls would that be?

These are the same sorts of things. Each page has an illustration of a balance holding various combinations of shapes--maybe a square, a triangle and a circle on one side, and two squares and a triangle on the other. (Just for an easy example--there's an actual sample here.) You have to choose which of several statements would always be true about the equation that's illustrated--for example, that a circle equals a square. It's good practice in deductive reasoning, and it's also--at this level--sort of a pre-pre-algebra. Here's a sample from Level 3, for comparison.

Third grader Crayons--who, as I said, has had some Miquon and "yogurt cup" practice with this sort of puzzle--whizzed through about the first twelve pages (of about forty practice pages--the rest are solutions), and then noticed that the questions started to get a bit harder. I don't know if she'd rate these as totally "fun"--she's at a stage where "challenging" doesn't always equal "fun"--but I think they're worthwhile, if only to give her a different kind of math activity (that she doesn't see as math). I think they'd be helpful for elementary students (or maybe older ones, using the higher levels) who are a bit burned out on numbers but who wouldn't be as intimidated by shapes. Since we're not finished the book yet, I'm not sure whether she'll be able to handle the whole thing this year or whether it will start to get a bit beyond her. [UPDATE: Crayons finished the book in late spring, doing a couple of pages a week. The end of the book wasn't a whole lot more difficult than the beginning, at least not beyond mid-elementary capabilities.]

Final Take: An interesting addition to a math program, and not too expensive.

The price: US$9.99 each.

Dewey's Disclaimer: We received this product free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.

Math Mammoth (TOS Review)

Treehouse Review Week

Math Mammoth Home Page
Free Samples Download
Placement Tests
FAQ (including ordering information)

"Fully reproducible math workbooks
and worktexts for grades 1-12.
Incredibly affordable!"
I mentioned a few weeks ago that we would be trying out Maria Miller's Math Mammoth series with Crayons this term. We received both grade 3 books in the Light Blue Series (more specifics on the grade 3 books here), and I printed out the first chapter.

"The first chapter in this book deals with addition and subtraction strategies. The student does a lot of mental math, learns addition and subtraction terminology, touches on algebraic problems in the lesson about addition/subtraction connection, practices borrowing, and more."

What else do you do in Grade 3? "Then we tackle the multiplication concept in chapter 2. After that come multiplication tables in chapter 3, so multiplication does take a big part of book A. Then comes a chapter about clock and time (chapter 4) and a chapter about money (chapter 5).

"In part B, we study place value with thousands (chapter 6), then measuring and geometry (chapters 7 and 8), followed by division in chapter 9. In chapter 10, we study a little about multiplying bigger numbers, and finally in chapter 11, it is time for some introductory fraction and decimal topics."

Why do I like this so far? As I've said before, I like the three-year curriculum we've been using with Crayons, but in its final year it does get a bit esoteric with Fibonacci numbers, measurement, and graphing concepts--and I've felt that she really did need more work this year on basics. I wanted to be sure that those arithmetic "acorns" she'd stored up didn't get buried under a lot of other leaves and nuts--nice leaves and nuts, but not what she most needs right now.

It might be that Timmy-Tiptoes part of being a Squirrel: dropping those nuts down deep through the hole in the tree, but not being sure exactly what went down there, or how you're going to get them out again later.--previous Treehouse post

I also like the balance we're getting between a bit of "mom teaching time" and then a reasonable amount of problems for Crayons to do alone--this works very well with the way we like to learn here, and seems to go at about the right pace. I like the uncluttered feeling I get when we work through these pages--they're not fancy, but they offer enough variety to keep things interesting, and include self-checking activities like finding all the answers in a long line of numerals. (If the answer isn't in there, you did it wrong.)

"When you use these books as your only or main mathematics curriculum, they can be like a "framework", but you do have some liberty in organizing the study schedule....This curriculum aims to concentrate on a few major topics at a time and study them in depth....This is opposite to the continually spiraling step-by-step curricula in which each lesson typically is about a different topic from the previous or next lesson, and includes a lot of review problems from past topics. This does not mean that your child wouldn't need occasional review. However, when each major topic is presented in its own chapter, this gives you more freedom to plan the course of study and choose the review times yourself."

This works for us.

An important question for our family: do you need a colour printer? In the third-grade workbooks I downloaded, the colours do make the pages prettier; but they also seem to work fine in black and white. If you're looking for material for younger children, you might want to check out the samples for those years to see if you want them done in colour. [Update, October 2010: We printed out the 3B book in colour because it has several chapters about geometry, measurement etc. which use pictures of rulers, measuring cups and other things that show up better with different colours.]

What is Math Mammoth like in general?

Math Mammoth offers a whole array of downloadable workbooks, from full curriculum, to collections of worksheets on single topics. At first the different series may seem confusing, but the website pretty much explains the differences, for example, between the Blue and the Light Blue books. The Blue series is more remedial or supplemental; Light Blue is designed as a full, largely self-teaching curriculum for grades 1-5.

What is there for older students? Very glad you asked: check out the middle-school and high-school stuff here, including the Make-It-Real series of workbooks. "Make It Real Learning products are workbooks that contain activities or problem situations taken from real-life, with real data. Some examples of the situations are: cell phone plans, autism, population growth, cooking, borrowing money, credit cards, life spans, music downloads, etc. etc. Each activity-lesson starts with basics and goes into more in-depth and challenging evaluations and questions."

What does this cost? It all depends on how much you want to get at one time. You can get the whole Light Blue series, for example--that is, all five grades plus answer keys, a worksheet maker etc.--for US$99 as a download or $104 on CD. Prices of one year's Light Blue curriculum (including the support materials) vary slightly between the Math Mammoth page (it says there they are $29.50) and the Kagi store download page (it's listed there as $33.36). You can also order printed workbooks through Lulu.com. General ordering information is here.

Final Take: Over the past few years, I've often noticed Math Mammoth's generosity in offering samples and prizes (I've won a couple of their other products myself), and their interest in working with homeschoolers. I think it's their flexibility that seems to make them a good choice for homeschooling--you can get what you need to start with, get more pages or more help if you need it, and even make up some of your own stuff with the support materials. There is no fancy encryption or stuff that makes printing limited or difficult. And the book we're using has been pretty much print-out-and-use--there's no big learning curve for the parent. I don't know how the materials for the upper years compare to other curricula, but I'd certainly include them in the possibilities for math in the years to come.

Dewey's Disclaimer: This product was received free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.