Posts
Hi all---
We had a meeting with the chair of the math department a couple of weeks back.
She told us that “if students need distributed practice parents can find worksheets online.”
Having spent many an hour finding worksheets online, not to mention a small fortune purchasing math textbooks and workbooks from Rainbow Resource Center, I had thought those days were behind me.
Wrong again! Last night I spent a couple of hours pulling worksheets from the web; I’ll be spending some time today scouting commercially available resources for teaching geometry.
So, to prevent other parents having to duplicate my efforts, I’m going to try to post my online sources, assuming I can locate the original URLs.
For today, I’m posting the single most useful resource I’ve found for reteaching math to your kids and providing the distributed practice they need to master the material:
Glencoe’s Parent and Student Study Guides
Glencoe has published every page of its 5 guides online in English and Spanish editions.
Description:
The Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide is designed to help you support, monitor, and improve your child's math performance. These worksheets are written so that you do not have to be a mathematician to help your child.
Each book contains:
A 1-page worksheet for every lesson in the Student Edition. Completing a worksheet with your child will reinforce the concepts and skills your child is learning in math class. Upside-down answers are provided right on the page.
These worksheets are fantastic, built to help parents help their kids while also earning a living and running a household. Wonderful.
URLs:
Glencoe has all kinds of other useful materials available online, too
Glencoe’s math page
Enter your state, check “parent,” hit enter.
That takes you to Glencoe’s “Online Learning Centers” where you can click on all of Glencoe’s math texts and survey the offerings.
Catherine J.
17 comments:
These worksheets are written so that you do not have to be a mathematician to help your child.
But do you have do know how to do the math?
mmmm.....I'm not sure.
These worksheets are the ultimate in compressed direct instruction.
Hey!
There's a new category!
compressed direct instruction
I should do a screen grab & post.
(instead of doing my actual job, of course)
Each sheet opens with a title & a boxed list of bullet points telling you what you're going to be practicing.
Then there are one or two brief teaching examples, with every step in the procedure shown and labeled.
Then you do a set of practice problems that start easy and build to slightly more complex.
At the end you have one "standardized test practice" item.
These worksheets are superb. Whoever built them - and for some reason the word "built" springs to mind - was really thinking.
He or she may have had a kid in the public schools, too.
All of this appears on one page, so you don't have the working memory challenge of flipping back and forth between pages trying to remember what was on the previous page.
You do need extra paper to work the examples, but that's fine; using a separate piece of paper doesn't particularly affect your ability to see the teaching example all-in-one-piece.
They don't have a Parent and Student Study Guide for Algebra II, more's the pity.
That implies to me that perhaps Glencoe assumes the parent should have taken these courses once himself.
otoh, Glencoe may simply assume that a student who makes it to algebra 2 no longer needs "help with homework."
I wish to heck they'd create a Parent Student Study Guide for Algebra 2 and beyond, though.
I used these sheets myself.
Christopher will be doing this one tonight: Line and Angle Relationships (pdf file)
My 8th grader's Algebra class is using the Glencoe Algebra I textbook.
She uses the online feature to facilitate studying for quizzes and tests. She first will do a practice test; if she needs more practice on a particular type of question, she can then focus on that.
From what I can tell, her teacher seems to be doing a good job of explaining the material.
Great resource, these study guides.
Many thanks for finding them, Catherine!
[I just wrote a longer comment that Blogger ate. Must remember to put things in memory before clicking]
oh heck - I want to read your comment!
It ate one of my comments today, too.
These books really are terrific.
I got Christopher up to speed on equations with variables on both sides tonight using two sheets on the subject from two of the Glencoe Study Guides.
Heard from Math Dad.
He says Ms You-Know-Who gave a test last week (Christopher was absent) where the kids had to write and solve equations with variables on both sides to find the measures of a complicated set of angles (assuming I've got that right).
Only problem: she's never taught the kids how to write or solve equations with variables on both sides.
He's tracked every hour of her class; he knows the textbook inside and out; he knows she has not taught this skill. (So do I.)
So he protests; she writes back that she taught it last year.
She didn't, and Math Dad knows it. (Me, too.)
He told her she probably taught it to her 7th grade class and forgot.
So tonight I taught Christopher how to solve equations with variables on both sides of the equation.
TONIGHT
As in ONE NIGHT
Tomorrow night I have to teach him how to write them - AND how to write them to figure out the measures of vertical, adjacent, supplementary, and complementary angles he doesn't really understand and can't (quite) disaggregate visually.
Math Dad sent Ms YKW an email saying he considers the writing of equations to be a central topic in algebra that should be taught on its own, not embedded in a second subject.
I wonder if my school knows they have to save all emails now?
It's a new law.
This is my chance at achieving immortality as a writer.
We used the Glencoe Pre-Algebra and thought the website was very helpful. Even if you can't do the math yourself, there is more explanation and examples for the kids. The practice quizzes at least give you a sense of where your kid is at. That's worth its weight in gold right there.
I wish they all had that kind of help.
SusanS
Post a Comment