[oceanghost]

I am just confronting this now. My daughter is 6, and I'm trying to teach her math and reading. She's excelling at reading. The thing about math is, I have to teach her math the way the standards specify. The problem is…

The common core math is just strange. I find it confusing, and I did a full tour at an engineering college.

Math is a “procedure”. That's why programs like MatLab/MathCad can solve equations-- they just have a set of rules that solve problems. Learning math is the process of internalizing these rules.

The common core stuff seems to be the opposite of this. I want to build with my daughter a set of skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, exponents etc, eventually moving on to trig, linear algebra and calc) she can build on. But common core hopelessly confuses even simple things like adition.

[electriclove]

Please look into Beast Academy (online without books) and work through it with your daughter. Read the comics to her and go through the exercises together as needed.

[oceanghost]

Thank you, I will look into this.

[sfink]

I'll second this.

Beast is the only thing I've come across that feels to me like it's actually teaching math.

[gnicholas]

Khan Academy worked well for our kid, who started at that age. She worked through 1-2 grades per year and is now in their Algebra series. The main complaint I have is that there is no concept of 'practice' or 'drilling'. You just learn something and go straight to the quiz.

There are two problems with this. The first is that it doesn't get kids used to doing practice, which is critical for learning more advanced skills.

The second is that the quizzes use a lot of multiple choice (particularly in the younger grades, where kids are not assumed to be literate). Getting a handful of multiple choice questions correct is not a good indicator of having mastered a topic. Once I realized this, I told my kid she had to get all of the questions correct on the quiz 3 times in a row in order to move on.