We've Made A Final Decision

Okay, it's a "final" decision as of today ;) Math is dd's least favorite subject. Maybe I should say she hates it with a passion. She and I have butted heads over this subject ever since she started school. There were times when she was younger where she insisted on doing it her own way. Setting her back one full year didn't help as much as I thought it would. Going from MCP to Saxon seemed to help her catch up, until this year. She began struggling with 87. I've watched her scores go downhill for awhile, not knowing what to do. One of my friends who had homeschooled her daughters with Saxon said she noticed the same thing with each of them when doing the problems in 87. She decided to switch to Chalkdust, which helped her daughters (even though they both said they preferred Saxon for the layout). Their scores increased and surpassed those in their homeschool group.

I know my husband would probably have heart failure over the price of Chalkdust, no matter how good the program is. We looked at the Math-U-See sample. It was not a good fit at all. Teaching Textbooks was another option recommended by several friends. I haven't ruled them out, as of yet, and am keeping that option available as a possibility in the future. So after much deliberation, we have decided to go with the "Life of Fred" books by Dr. Stanley Schmidt.



Yes, Life of Fred! He is 5 1/2 years old, and a professor at KITTENS University. Okay, so they're not "textbooks" like what we would know as textbooks. If they work, great! If not, I haven't wasted a ton of money and I'm not worried about dd falling too far behind. We were planning on doing math and science over the summers, in order for her to get ahead and extra credits in both subjects. Since she had so many problems, we decided to begin at the beginning, in his fractions and decimals/percents books. She should be able to go through them relatively quickly; she just needs to relearn the proper way to do both. That's the beauty of homeschooling :)