Singapore Primary Mathematics, Grade Four

Woodjie loves Pokemon! 

Woodjie and Rose have just begun Singapore Mathematics Grade 4!  We have the US Edition, which is not aligned with the Common Core standards.  (Because why do that to a child if you're bothering to homeschool?)

Singapore Math comes with a semester-long textbook and a workbook for each student.  Right now, they're beginning Singapore Math 4A and when they are finished with that, it'll be time for 4B.  It will take us a fair while to get through the books because most of it is not busywork.  It's teacher-intensive and often needs a bit of explaining and classroom practice to be done well.

Usually I'll teach the concept from the textbook and go over the problems in the text with the children (using my dry erase board and bad drawings), and then allow them to do the workbook exercise on their own. 

 Often Singapore Math will encourage you to work differently with your child.  For example, in our lesson on place value, we actually got Post-It notes out and broke down the number 68,974 into 60,000 and 8,000 and so on.  I stuck the numbers on top of one another so the children could see that the "7" is really "70."  That's what the exercise is about; recognising that each part of a number has its own value.

I'd highly recommend this curriculum for parents who want to actively teach their children each lesson themselves.  If you're interested, I've reviewed it in a bit more detail previously when I used it to teach Emperor and Elf.

Wow, that was ages ago...