A Look Inside Daily Math Plans: Singapore Math 2A/2B
With all the math programs available today, the mere thought of choosing one can make a homeschool parent’s head spin! Math lessons can be overly long, word problems incredibly confusing, and online programs expensive and overly glitchy. Overwhelming, thick textbooks with pages crowded with too many problems and illustrations can make elementary math seem like the math year that will never end!
Add to these frustrations parents who are short on time and young children who have short attention spans, and together you have the perfect storm for one l-o-n-g homeschool year of math!
What’s a parent to do?!? Well… let me introduce Heart of Dakota’s Daily Math Plans: Singapore Math 2A/2B!
What makes Heart of Dakota’s Daily Math Plans: Singapore Math 2A/2B so special?
Heart of Dakota’s 2A/2B Singapore Math’s Daily Plans are the opposite of everything I just described to you. Math lessons are concise, hands-on plans make problems easy to solve, resources are succinct, and pages are uncluttered. There are no tricky software programs to tackle! In fact, the only resources you need are the 2A Singapore Primary Math Workbook, the 2B Singapore Primary Math Workbook, and the Heart of Dakota Daily Math Plans. Heart of Dakota’s easy daily plans use simple household items for manipulatives and make this already streamlined, inexpensive course a success for kiddos in second grade!
Parents I’ve spoken to on the phone give wonderful reviews of Heart of Dakota’s 2A/2B Daily Math Plans. They say it made math open-and-go, time conscious for little ones who are less focused, and enjoyable thanks to the fun hands-on plans.
Why did Carrie like Singapore Math and choose to write the Daily Math Plans?
Carrie found many of the math programs she tried were just too time-consuming in the amount of teacher presentation required. As she added more children to her homeschool, she realized a 30-minute math presentation for one kiddo would quickly turn into 2 hours of math presentation when multiplied times her 4 boys. That left precious little time for the many other necessary school subjects. This was one of the deciding factors that helped her say ‘no’ to other math programs she tried.
Similarly, she found some of the programs required too much prep or planning ahead prior to teaching. Other programs had way too much drill or too many problems daily. She found tweaking which problems to do daily led to the programs themselves hardly resembling their original form anymore. This was another deciding factor that led her away from using other math programs.
The main deciding factors for Carrie choosing Singapore Math were it has short lessons, little prep, and higher-level thinking; plus, it is economical and in a convenient workbook form. This is in keeping with the Charlotte Mason philosophy for math… short lessons, some hands-on, almost no prep, in workbook form (to cut down on time spent copying problems), with an emphasis on higher-level thinking and reasoning along with computation. She also wanted it to be economical if possible, and it is!
How do HOD’s Daily Math Plans: Singapore Math 2A/2B work?
The one problem we found with Singapore was that the clean page layout and the few problems on each page made it easy to assign too much daily, thus complicating what should have been a short and sweet program. Carrie compensated for that by writing her Daily Math Plans: Singapore Math 2A/2B. These plans follow the original Singapore pacing by having children complete 2 workbooks in one school year.
Where the Singapore Math plans were lacking for young children, Carrie chose to write hands-on math lessons and incorporate them into her Daily Math Plans schedule. These activities replace the textbooks for Singapore Primary Math 2A/2B.
Heart of Dakota’s 2A/2B Singapore Math Plans use quick-to-grab household or art cart items for hands-on lessons. Crayons, markers, chocolate chips, cereal pieces, crackers, cups, spoons – all things you have on hand – make teaching this easy peasy. The hands-on parts of the lessons are short, fun, and easily replicated if kiddos get stuck on a problem when doing the written problems in their workbooks.
Math lessons begin with quick hands-on activities and then move on to the written part in the workbook. Fewer problems make math time shorter, but that doesn’t mean this math is a no-brainer! Though problems are fewer in number, they encourage using mental math and multiple strategies to solve them. This way, kiddos learn strong mental math skills. They also learn the “why” behind math rather than just the “how”. Finally, math doesn’t take forever to do! And most kiddos find… math can actually be pretty fun!
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Need Singapore Math placement help? Click here! Be sure to choose the Primary Mathematics U.S. and Standards Editions Tests!
