The Good and the Beautiful Math
Last year was our first year of homeschooling. In college I had taken a few elementary education classes, but I felt totally incompetent to teach my 1st, 2nd, and 4th grader math. I reviewed lots of different math curriculum. One of my friends told me to just pick one curriculum and try it out instead of stressing about all the different options. Some of my favorite options were the Good and the Beautiful, BJU, and Abeka.
I ultimately decided to go with the Good and the Beautiful for math. I liked that there were so many fun games I could play with my kids. I bought the 2nd grade math to start during the summer with one of my children that was struggling with math in public school. Over the summer, my child really enjoyed the games. She did really well with the one on one time we had and using the manipulatives to represent a math concept. It was wonderful to see her go from saying she hated math to enjoying it. I absolutely enjoyed doing this math curriculum over the summer with just her. It wasn’t overwhelming and we had fun together.
Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.
Shakuntala Devi, Indian writer and mental calculator
http://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/math-quotes/
During the school year my 1st and 2nd grader really liked playing the games that came in the old math boxes. The lessons were short enough that they enjoyed them, but they didn’t get overwhelmed. My 1st grader especially enjoyed the tangrams that came with the math box.
Nonetheless, I found that with multiple children and having to do all the games and the extra supplements in the lessons I was getting run down. It also took some extra time to find the manipulatives or math game boards and pieces. While I was looking for the different parts to a game, my children would get distracted and rowdy. Around the time I was feeling this way, the Good and the Beautiful announced that they were changing many of their math courses to make things easier on parents. They designed new textbooks and new manipulatives so that parents didn’t have to dig around as much. Yet they said their would still be a lot of fun in their math lessons. I bought the new books and math boxes for this homeschool year. When my 1st grader finished his math for the year we tried a couple of the math lessons in his 2nd grade book. I found that I actually missed using the manipulative from the old math box. During one lesson I actually did get my daughters old manipulatives out from the year before and used them to explain a concept to my son instead of doing what the new curriculum said to do.
Some of the other parts of this math program that didn’t work for our family is how multiplication is taught. The program has you listen to random songs to learn the multiplication facts. We did that some and my kids were learning some of the math facts. There were so many though and there wasn’t really order to them. We decided not to do that part of the curriculum. Something that worked better for my children was using skip counting songs in addition to other resources that focused on one set of multiplication facts at a time such as 1’s, 10’s, or 2’s.
Honestly I’m a little scared to use the new curriculum. We’re going to try it out. I think it’ll make it easier to find the parts to the lessons that we need, but I’m worried my children won’t understand the concepts the lessons are trying to teach.
I will give an update later in the year about how this new curriculum is going and whether it’s working for us or not. If it doesn’t I might have to look for a new curriculum that is more hands on like the previous edition of the Good and the Beautiful math. This especially applies to my child that struggles with math. She seems to do so much better with manipulatives. I’m leaning towards using Saxon math her if the Good and the Beautiful doesn’t work out. If I can find the original good and beautiful math 4 workbooks for my struggling child we might try that instead of switching curriculums to.
If you want to check out this curriculum you can go to https://www.goodandbeautiful.com. As I’ve stated before there’s so many things I like and my children enjoy about this curriculum. I really hope that it works out for my children so we don’t have to switch. I hope that I find that the new workbooks do explain the math concepts in a way my children can understand without having to search around for all the manipulatives.
Update: I loved the new math that The Good and the Beautiful came out with. They did a wonderful job. The only thing I wish is that not everything was a game and sometimes there was more independent review problems. Occasionally, when it was multiplication or something easier for my daughter, I would just write the math problems that were part of a game on a white board and make her do them that way. I had a much easier time with the games. There was no longer the need to dig for long periods of time through a big box. That was extrememly helpful. With four kids to teach, I just don’t have the time. All in all we loved this math curriculum. My only wish is that there was an online grading option for the older grades but there was still workbooks. My son gets really frustrated when I don’t keep up on grading because then we have forever to work on corrections together.