Our Right Start Math curriculum is going very well.  I am really very pleased with this curriculum so far.  It is suppose to rival the Asian way of teaching math.  I can already see an improvement in Parker’s basic math facts after just a few lessons.  One of the biggest points of this curriculum is that children not use their fingers to count or add.  It reviews the numbers from 0-10 quite a bit and teaches children to see numbers in groups of five.  So 6 would be 5 and 1 and 9 would be 5 and 4 or 1 less than 10.  They use an abacus to ’see’ this and it helps.  This curriculum was created by Dr Joan Cotter, who has a BSEE, a PhD in mathematics, and was a Montessori teacher.

One of the games that this curriculum teaches is called Go to the Dump, a spin-off of Go Fish.  You use the A-9 cards from a deck of cards and instead of finding matches you try to find pairs that equal 10.  Parker and Sophie both enjoyed this game.

Here is Parker working with his abacus:

And here is Sarah doing her part:

Tags: math, Right Start