I've been waiting for this for some time, and am happy to report as of today or so, portions of Art of Problem Solving's new Elementary curriculum ("Beast Academy") are now available. I ordered it. It's shipping Media Mail, so it'll be awhile before it gets here but I'll report back after it arrives and we take it for a test drive.
So far, they've released 3A and 3B, obviously part of their third grade curriculum, though they're working on grades 2-5. We're currently nearing the end of Singapore 2A (and halfway through Math U See Beta), and though the 3B materials look a bit beyond my oldest yet, 3A is within close striking distance, based on the assessment test.
The samples look fun and my daughter was stoked when she perused the available pdf's.
Terri, thanks so much for pointing this out. I always rely on AoPS for delightfully tricky ("tricky" here as in skill-expanding) problems, but they don't seem as good at just a clear, well-sequenced, well-explained, straightforward presentation of the foundation. They seem to want to hurry into the tricky problems before establishing much of a base, probably due to Richard's philosophy that the base is really learned by discovery while thinking hard about hard problems.
ReplyDeleteWhen teaching my oldest from the AoPS algebra book, I always end up having to add a lot of explanation that is not in the book. (This no doubt differs from child to child.) An AoPS book feels less like a smoothly ascending staircase of explanations with problems designed to establish mastery of each step than like a collection of interesting problems with some explanatory filler designed to introduce the problems.
I'm sure that I want these books, but I'm not sure whether they'll replace Singapore Primary Math or provide a source of great "enrichment" problems to expand on the foundation established by Sing PM.