Starting Math

Math is not my kids’ favorite subject. That would be science. But, math is by far the easiest one for them. Since I’m a former public school math teacher and my son never seriously struggled with math, my first instinct was to skip all pre-made workbooks and create my own. Then, I started thinking about all the work involved in making up problems, so I punted and headed to the local curriculum store for workbooks. I’m still designing what is taught when and how, but the pre-made worksheets are a huge time saver.

Eventually, my son will return to public school. To make that transition easier on the academic side, I am trying to include all the objectives required for his grade.  The store had one set of workbooks that were specifically tied to the new common core standards for math. Since we’re compacting 7th and 8th grade together, I bought the sets for both years. They came with separate teacher’s and student’s books. An old fashion Pre-algebra workbook completed the math library.


Before we started into math with home schooling, we had a week of pre-assessments. It was clear that my son weaknesses were with fractions and negatives. Most days, I’ll go through the pre-made worksheets and edit a few to include those skills.

The common core based workbooks are called On Core Mathematics, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I really like them as a supplement to what we are doing. They are not the kinds of problems we had in math years ago. All new concepts are introduced using step-by-step discovery methods. The teacher’s manual includes notes for how to explain the topic, including sample questioning strategies and answers. The focus is on understanding the reasoning and meaning behind the numbers.

For most kids, these would be an excellent starting point. For my concrete thinker, though, the open ended questions were too much to start with. So, we have to start with “Here’s the formula” and “Move this here” approach. Once he is comfortable with the mechanics, we switch to the On Core book to help him understand what the equations mean in real world terms. There are also plenty of application problems.  We follow the order of the On Core books because they make sense for what we are doing. The books are set up, though, to make it easy to pull specific lessons or do things in a different order.

On days when things are going really well, I might get crazy and bring out manipulatives such as algebra tiles.  Yes, that’s backwards to how most kids learn, but that’s my concrete thinker!