So, Is Kumon basically a waste of money?

I’ve heard Kumon is basically drill. You could do the same thing at home using your own worksheets.

Homeschoolers often use CalcuLadders ($13.50 per grade), which is a workbook full of timed drills that makes the whole thing very convenient. Basically, there are about 17 levels of drill per workbook, with 16 pages of the same worksheet in each level. The child does a worksheet a day, trying to improve speed. Once a certain speed is attained with accuracy, the child moves to the next level.

Have you looked at Math Facts the Fun Way? This is a fast way of teaching the basic facts, with good retention. Website is http://www.citycreek.com

It would probably be most effective to use something like Math Facts the Fun Way first (to teach the facts), followed by CalcuLadders (to improve speed).

Another facts drill program that is excellent is Quarter Mile Math. It is more expensive (up to $99 for the whole K-12 program), but it’s good. QMM works better for us than CalcuLadders.

Mary

Tonia, I know a number of people who have tried Kumon and only one of them reported a positive experience. I understand that kids are given worksheets to do at home. Parents have told me of great difficulties getting their kidds to comply with this. I replied to your earlier post suggested flashcards and timed sheets and noticed a lot of later posts suggested more involved ways. I didn’t suggest that because it didn’t appear you felt your daughter was unable to learn the facts. Rather it appeared, as in the case of my daughter, she had no real incentive to learn them as long as no one at school wasn’t making a fuss that she was using counting on with her fingers to do the calculation. I have gotten by without buying anything (except paper) by making up my own sheets and copying them. I’m not familiar with Calculadders, which Mary suggested, but it could save the minor hassle of composing sheets and copying them. If you actually find that your daughter is having trouble learning math facts with old fashioned flashcards and timed sheets—give it a week or two—you could then look into alternative ways of teaching like the suggestions made for Math Facts the Fun Way. I also forgot to mention practicing skip counting, another valuable, cost-free method, but one of the posters did. (It is particularly useful for multiplication.)

I am very happy I found this board before committing to paying $125 per month for something I can do myself. I did give my daughter a timed worksheet on basic math facts and it had about 20 problems. It did take her 3 minutes when it should’ve only taken a little less than a minute, probably. So there is work to do, but I do see an improvement, because there was a time (about 3 months ago) when that same worksheet would’ve taken 10 minutes.I am just so elated when I discovered that she does know how to subtract double and triple digit problems.

Thanks again

Hi! I just recently reposted a home-based almost zero-cost (only paper and markers) way to teach math facts that is very very effective and not stressful. Try it — it does work, and you may like it! And trying won’t cost you anything but a little time (please give it a few weeks).

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I would go light on flash cards — they unnerve many students, especially those who have had bad classroom experiences. OK now and then for a short while, but beware of pressure. Accuracy is vital. Speed will come with knowledge; don’t push to run before you walk.
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I do worry, badly, about timed sheets and doing the exact same sheet over and over again. I get so many students in high school and college who hate and despise math, who think that math is nothing but memorization and drudgery, and sure they do know the basic whole-number facts, but as soon as they reached middle school and some personal independence they swore off and will never ever in their whole lives do any math again. They are forced into a remedial math class by college policies and they have to sit there but by God they absolutely refuse to learn anything. Is this an attitude we want to teach?

You can get the same amount of repetition by using many *different* applied problems. Yes, it takes longer to read a problem than to do a row of drills. So what? Are we in a competition who can fill in the most pounds of paper?

If the student is actively involved in the problem, how many dollars to pay for the shopping list or how many school buses to take the kids to the zoo, the material will actually go into long-term memory. You can do two hundred pages of drill and still fail the test because it was just waste that was never stored.

There is a consistent problem of retention in US schools — material is “taught” and “learned” in one grade, and the students next year act as if they have never heard of the concept. Well, they haven’t ever really heard it! They have been threatened with failure if they don’t know it, forced to fill out endless drill sheets, and tested day in and day out, but they have never actually sat down and heard why the concept is interesting and useful. So it got filed in the “useless and stupid garbage you are forced to do in school” memory bank, which gets dumped immediately after the test. As parents and homeschoolers, you have probably tried to make your lessons more relevant; please try to avoid getting pulled back into the drill-test-speed trap; it’s a dead end.

Victoria, You write so much wisdom, I hesitate to register a little bit of disagreement here. My daughter had a deep understanding of the concepts behind math facts and could do word problems (even pretty tricky and complicated ones) until the cows came home (counting on with her fingers to do the the calculation right)—she is very bright. But her view about learning math facts was sort of like Leona Helmsley’s about taxes—it’s only for the little people. She wasn’t blocked on the facts; she simply didn’t want to bother wasting precious time in school on them when she could be doing another more social activity with a classmate. I did flashcards with her initially until she could answer pretty readily. But…they are very boring and I never went over five minutes a day with them. And once she could do it fairly readily we never did them again. We did (and do) carry on with timed sheets. But…we never do more than five minutes a day and most days it takes 3 minute—1 minute each for 25 problems (only up to the nines) of subtraction, multiplication, and division (each operation on a separate sheet). I vary the sheets every day. It’s become part of her morning routine and she doesn’t mind—actually enjoys beating the clock as she is very competitive. I worked a lot with my son (until too much homework interefered), who has great difficulty with word problems but seemed to have absorbed math facts through some sort of mental osmosis. I used to give him timed sheets to vary the stuff with manipulatives etc. to teach concepts and he actually enjoyed them. Unlike his sister, he is very uncompetitive but it gave him a boost to have something he could so obviously shine on compared to the struggle on word problems. Flashcards and timed sheets are just tools and I agree with you—they may not be the right tool for certain jobs (like for a kid who is totally blocked on memorizing math facts) or for certain temperments and even where they may be a useful tool they must be used judiciously. And going back to the original post about Kumon, I think this where problems occur—it seems to be just endless math sheets that have to be done for extended periods every day.

Yes, I think flash cards and timed drills are OK in moderation — I’d go for a couple of times a week, but one a day for five or ten minutes isn’t too much. And the idea of beating your own previous score is a good thing.

I’m just wary of constant drill. That is not math!!

I really have trouble with the idea of doing the exact same drill sheet over and over; the meaning of the problem can get lost and you end up short-term memorizing a list of answers, which is good for absolutely nothing once you leave that particular drill sheet and go on to anything else. If you want to repeat drill, please at least vary the order of the problems so the problems are actually read! With computers it’s now very easy to give the same problems in varied orders.

By the way., my own daughter never was taught the facts very well, and yes it has slowed her down. But what caused her trouble was exactly what people are proposing as a “solution” — a teacher who did a lot of meaningless drills. My daughter rebelled and ended up weak on math facts, a problem when you do university math and physics, but she *is* coping. The kids who were obedient then rebelled later and got left out on high school math. My niece, on the other hand, went to 1970’s schools that didn’t believe in drills or memorization at all, and she somehow went from being a gifted student in Grade 3 to being in the low-level-vocational track in Grade 9, and yes, the low expectations of the system had a lot to do with that.

Seeing both ends of the scale in my own family, plus all the students I’ve taught in college, plus all those I tutor, I’m trying to call for a happy medium.

Math facts are very important; they are the foundation the reasoning and measuring and problem-solving is built on. But if you only build the foundation and stop there, you end up with an empty basement full of water.

Reasoning and problem-solving and measurement are the center, the reason why you do math, but they can’t stand alone without the foundation to attach them to.

Unfortunately it’s easy to be polemic and invent miracle cures and do a hard-sell job when you’re on the extreme ends. It’s hard to get people fired up over aiming at a happy medium.

My daughter, who is now 13, took Kumon during 4th and 5th grade. It really helped her to learn her math facts. When they say you have to get 100%, it is just that you need to correct your errors. Moreover, the work sheets are set up in a way that your child learns the principles behind the problems. I thought it was extremely helpful and that my daughter learned basic arithmetic fairly easily with Kumon.