The Homeschool How To
I don't claim to know anything about homeschooling, so I set out on a journey to ask the people who do! Join me as I chat with homeschoolers to discuss; "why are people homeschooling," "what are all the ways people are using to homeschool today," and ultimately, "should I homeschool my kids?"
The Homeschool How To
Curriculum Series: Math with Confidence Levels K & 3
Unlock the secrets to making math a joyous journey for your homeschoolers! Join me as I sit down with Carolyn, a homeschooling pro who has found her rhythm with the Math with Confidence curriculum. She's here to spill the beans on how this intuitive resource has transformed her daily teaching routine. Designed as an 'open and go' tool, it offers clear, streamlined lesson plans that have been a game-changer for her two young scholars. Through her narrative, we get a peek into the engaging warm-up activities, comprehensive work pages, and the curriculum's unique way of piecing together concepts from number recognition for the little ones to fractions and geometry for the older kids.
Carolyn's insights shed light on the spiral learning technique at the heart of Math with Confidence, ensuring that key skills stick through consistent review, an approach that has her kids mastering math with, well, confidence! Each lesson is crafted to be digestible, making it a practical choice for any homeschooling family. Whether you're a seasoned veteran or new to the homeschooling scene, this episode is packed with wisdom that could help you turn math lessons from dreaded to anticipated. Plus, don't miss Carolyn's personal stories and tips over on Instagram @unboxed.learning.at.home, where she documents her family's educational adventures.
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Welcome to the Homeschool How-To Find my Curriculum, a series where we talk all about curriculum. I've been interviewing homeschooling families for over a year now on my main podcast, the Homeschool How-To, but I really wanted to zero in on curriculum. There's so much out there. How do I know what would work best for me and my child? How do I know what works for one child would work for the other? I might like the curriculum I'm using now, but how do I know there's not a better one out there, especially if I don't know all the curriculums? And what about supplemental curriculum? Should I be using that too? This series is to help you decide just that. I'm going to interview parents who are using all the curriculums so that you can decide the absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey. The absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey. Welcome With us. Today we have Carolyn. Hi, carolyn, how are you? Thank you for being here, hi, I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for having me Well, thank you for being on here.
Speaker 2:Do you have your own entrepreneurship around homeschooling as well? I just share a lot about what we do day to day on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Yeah, unbox learning at home, okay great, which I can put that in the show's description too. So I'll have you send me that link if anyone wants to check you out further. So what we are going to talk about today is math with confidence. I know nothing about this when I've heard of it, but I'm really excited to learn about it because I have been using the good and the beautiful with my son at the kindergarten level and I spoke with Justine in a different episode also about the good and the beautiful, so that seems like that's very heavily on everyone's radar.
Speaker 1:I don't know if their marketing is better than anyone else's, and that's why but I really want to get into alternatives and so if you could just kind of tell us about the ages of your kids that you use math with confidence.
Speaker 2:So I have a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, so we are using the kindergarten with the five-year-old and then the grade three or third grade with my eight-year-old.
Speaker 1:Oh, perfect. So this will be a nice comparison, because I'm doing the five-year-old level, kindergarten level as well. Okay, so the math with confidence. Obviously it's for math First of all. Is it what they call an open and go curriculum?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, so open and go. Basically you can. It tells you exactly what you need to say to teach each lesson, and I really love that because it kind of takes the guesswork out of it and it's written in very simple terms for your child to understand.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's awesome. And what does the day-to-day sort of look like with this curriculum? And you know, do you do the kindergarten and the third grade level at the same time or do you do one-on-one with you know separately?
Speaker 2:I would love to do it at the same time, but with the age gap is is too large to be able to do it at the same time, so I do do it one on one with them. So for each of them there's a textbook and a workbook, and each lesson would start with a warm up activity. So for kindergarten it would be something like collecting objects around the house and putting them into groups of five, for example. And so for grade three it would be maybe practicing your two times tables or memory work, like what is the name of the top number and the bottom number of a fraction, and then from there it goes into a lesson.
Speaker 2:Kindergarten is obviously more basic. It's focusing on quantity recognition. So if you were to roll a dice, your child would know what the number is. They would know it's a five instead of counting the dots. Gotcha and yeah. And then there's a single work page for each lesson in kindergarten where your child would write a number that they're learning about that day. Trace it and write it, and then there would be some matchups as well.
Speaker 1:Okay. So that kind of leads us nicely into what do they cover at each level. So the math with confidence. At the kindergarten level, what's the bird's eye view of what they would be learning that year? You mentioned, obviously, the sight recognition of the number, not having to count but to recognize that that's five dots on the dice. What other stuff are they learning that year?
Speaker 2:So in kindergarten they would be learning your numbers 1 to 10, and then 10 to 20, and then numbers all the way up to 100. They would be doing shapes, directions, patterns, um, comparing numbers to the number 10, adding and subtracting at a very basic level, and then measurements as well, and grade three. It would cover multiplication, fractions, division, geometry, length, weight and capacity. So it sounds like a lot and it is, but it's not like you finish for grade three, for example, you wouldn't finish multiplication and then never look at it again for the rest of the year. So the idea with this curriculum is to master the skill to lead to proficiency, and they use a spiral approach for learning, which means that you're periodically going to revisit the topic again and again to create that mastery in your mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. I've heard I've had people on my podcast that do actually wrote a curriculum. This one woman wrote a history curriculum like that that spirals. So you're coming back to it every three years and each time you're delving deeper into it. So you're coming back to it every three years and each time you're delving deeper into it. So I love that idea of the spiraling because you learn it once, you forget it. So it makes so much sense. Yes, okay. So you talked a little bit about the day-to-day. What a lesson would look like with the going around the house to get five objects. How long does each lesson take about?
Speaker 2:So for kindergarten it's really like 10 minutes. It's super short. You know you're dealing with five-year-olds so they have short attention spans, so about 10 minutes. Grade three would take about 20 to 30 minutes depending on how quick your child picks it up.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah, that's good, though, because that's still not. I mean, you think they're in the classroom for six plus hours, so it's like, okay, you get that done in 30 minutes even.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in grade three or in third grade, each lesson is about three workbook pages, and so the first page is always parent-led. So you would be sitting down together and looking at the new problem, the new concept that you're learning in that lesson, and then from there there's usually a game that involves a deck of cards, for example, and you would be doing, let's say, you're learning the five times tables and each card that you pull, you would be multiplying that by five and then there's like a little game board on the worksheet. From there there's the next. Two pages are for independent work, so they are fairly self-explanatory and they're visually appealing. But what I usually do is quickly go over what's needed in each section and then I leave my son to do it on his own and then, when he's finished, I take a look at it, see how it looks and if he understands it and if anything needs to be corrected.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that that sounds awesome, very straightforward. Um, it's very straightforward. So how many lessons is there in the curriculum itself? Does it cover an entire year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so kindergarten is, they're broken down. Kindergarten and grade three are very different in the way they're broken down. Kindergarten has everything into weeks, so it has week one, week two, all the way up to 32. And there's about 10 units within the 32 week break. So you'd be doing maybe five, four to five lessons a week. Grade three there are 16 units and there are nine lessons in each unit. So if you were to do four lessons a week, let's say you would finish it in 36 weeks, so you could take as long or as short as you wanted. If you homeschool all year round, you can stretch it out, and if you want to follow the school year, then you just rearrange your schedule so that it works that way.
Speaker 1:And do you remember how much this curriculum cost when you purchased it?
Speaker 2:So I'm also in Canada, so everything, everything is more expensive up here. You guys probably get way better deals, Sometimes actually buying from some of the US sites. Even with the exchange we actually get it cheaper.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:And we're over here complaining about prices. It's. It was not super expensive in my opinion.
Speaker 1:I would think it was probably between probably under a hundred dollars or so and do they give you the option to do like a download and print yourself, or is it just buy the?
Speaker 2:workbooks as you buy the. You buy the textbook and you buy the workbook.
Speaker 1:Okay are you able to use it on multiple children, like could you use the third grade one on your kindergartner when they are at that level? You could.
Speaker 2:If your child is writing in the workbook, you can't reuse it. But if you have a lot of printers nowadays have a photocopier, so you could you know if you were thinking ahead photocopy everything and then that way you don't need to purchase it.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right Now. Does your children enjoy doing the math with confidence? Have you used any other math curriculums that you know you can compare it to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, curriculums that you know you can compare it to. Yeah, um, so with my oldest before math, with confidence we were doing Singapore math and that was pretty, it was okay it. I found it wasn't necessarily very much open and go and it was the basic concepts for him were very easy to grasp, so it was never really difficult, which sort of just made it, I guess you know, easy in that sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, You're just going.
Speaker 2:when we were getting yeah, going through the motions.
Speaker 2:And then I was thinking about grade three and knowing that in Canada, at least where I am, that's when multiplication is typically introduced, at least where I am that's when multiplication is typically introduced and I thought about me learning multiplication and I had difficulty when I was in school and I was like how, how am I going to teach this?
Speaker 2:And that made me do a little research and I found some information on math of confidence. I've heard about it through friends. I looked it up and I I saw a review on the grade three curriculum specifically and I really love the way it was laid out. And so we just decided, since we're doing grade three, well, I might as well pick up the kindergarten one as well and use that with my little guy. Well, I might as well pick up the kindergarten one as well and use that with my little guy If my kids like it. My eight-year-old, my oldest one he would probably rather play Lego, but overall, because the lessons aren't too long, he's okay with it. My kindergartner if I approach everything as a game, he is more willing to jump in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tracing a number over and over is not something he would love to do.
Speaker 1:I've heard that there's a game schooling thing that people are doing now where they're just educating through games, and I'm dying to get people on the podcast that are doing that because apparently it's a thing and it's blowing up. But it makes a lot of sense because my son, five years old, obsessed with games like, wants to play Candyland and Monopoly all day long. I'm like I don't want to. He's all upset because the. Candyland cards are missing, so we have to go search for those after this.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that makes a lot of sense that if we make it a game, it can be fun. Now, are there any games within? I think you did mention that at the third grade. Are there games within the math lesson? I think you did mention that at the third grade.
Speaker 2:Are there games like within the math lesson? Yes, there are. It's something that the parent would need to participate in and slightly prep for. Like you would need to know that you need a deck of cards or a couple of like little like markers or something along those lines to play the game. Okay, they're not mandatory.
Speaker 1:Um, you could skip them if you wanted to. And is this a religious curriculum or secular, secular, okay and um? Do they have like tests in them, reviews, that sort of thing, or is it just kind of laid out?
Speaker 2:so in grade three at the end of each unit there's a review, okay, and it says it's optional. I guess it really depends on the parents.
Speaker 1:Some parents I find are very for testing and some are not really. Yeah, and some. You probably need it for your reporting and this and that. So would you use this curriculum again? Yes, yes, I'll be buying the fourth grade. Okay, anything that you didn't like about it?
Speaker 2:Overall, I'd say I've been very happy with it and there hasn't really been anything that I don't like about it. It's laid out logically and it's very easy to follow.
Speaker 1:Okay, nice, awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking with us today about math with confidence for the. This is for the kindergarten level and the grade three level. Thank you, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Please consider sharing this podcast, or my main podcast, the Homeschool how To with friends, family, on Instagram or in your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. The more this podcast is shared, the longer we can keep it going and the more hope we have for the future. Thank you,