best math curriculum

My district uses TouchMath - http://www.touchmath.com - for some special ed kids. (I have a confession - I used it myself sometimes when I’m tired or having difficulty coming up with an answer.) Its very kinetic and visual which can help with retention. One student I’ve worked with this year started out being very slow and having a lot of difficulty with basic math (had difficulty with 6 + 7). He is now able to do triple digit addition (687 + 952) without help and his accuracy is up to 95%. His subtraction scores have also gone up. This is after years and years of manipulatives, practice, etc. with no benefit. He just needed a way that connected the numbers with his brain.

(No, I don’t sell TouchMath, I’m just a VERY satisfied customer who loves the product.)

I don’t know how widely they are used by school districts, but Math-U-See and RightStart Math are book manipulatives-based approaches that tend to work very well with a wide variety of children. They are both strong on teaching math concepts.

Saxon is used in some schools. It has a very repetitious, incremental approach that works well for students who need a lot of repetition. It does not work well with whole-to-part learners, however. In the lower grades, it has a reputation of over-teaching calculation and under-teaching concepts.

If I am not mistaken TouchMath teaches only mathematical calculation, not concepts.

I’ve used both Saxon and Math-U-See in my resource room with some students; I love Math-U-See and it is becoming my primary resource, supplemented when needed. The web site is mathusee.org (I think the .org is correct); it is sold through consultants, who have always been very helpful. The only requirement is that each room you use it in have a VCR/DVD player or a computer with a DVD player.

Math-U-See website is http://www.mathusee.com and RightStart website is http://www.alabacus.com

Nancy

Saxon math does not offer enough repetition THAT lesson for each new concept. Witnessing the after-math (no pun inteneded) from Saxon, it is not effective at all. In Norman, Oklahoma where it was developed, it is not used…doesn’t that say something?

[quote=scifinut]My district uses TouchMath - http://www.touchmath.com - for some special ed kids. (I have a confession - I used it myself sometimes when I’m tired or having difficulty coming up with an answer.) Its very kinetic and visual which can help with retention. One student I’ve worked with this year started out being very slow and having a lot of difficulty with basic math (had difficulty with 6 + 7). He is now able to do triple digit addition (687 + 952) without help and his accuracy is up to 95%. His subtraction scores have also gone up. This is after years and years of manipulatives, practice, etc. with no benefit. He just needed a way that connected the numbers with his brain.

(No, I don’t sell TouchMath, I’m just a VERY satisfied customer who loves the product.)[/quote]

The way you promote this very expensive product you sound like their number one sales person. In 1966 (many, many years before TM) I used dots on top of the numbers and found that it did damage to students ability to do math. It Slowed them down, as counting by ones is too slow and they got stuck on the dots. The only cure I know of for this problem is to relearn the number symbols without the dots on top of them. The charts for this are on the “Dotmath for kids” web site. I hope you will be able to recover from the dots on the numbers. It took me many year to recover from doing that and was only able to do that with the “Dotmath for kids” system.