This has been the hardest Math year yet for us here at Petra School! We loved Miquon for the early years and transitioned well to Saxon 6/5 with no problems last year.  This year, however, Saxon 7/6 has required a sit down figure it out every day strategy. Mom and son seem to forget what they said yesterday, constantly looking up what they wanted us to do. You start to get the feeling that we’re just on the right path!  We weren’t understanding the fractions, my son wasn’t understanding the decimals. I knew we were on a path of co-dependant failure when my 12 year old asked me one day what a dime was, and emotional breakdown on both side pursued that day. . . . .

How are we going to get through this?  Switching to Teaching Textbooks 7 didn’t seem like an option that would solve the problem.  And then I remembered a friend’s advice on Grammar.  They use Daily Grams.  She purchased a few books on How To for punctuation and such, when they get stuck, they look up the answer, if they still can’t figure it out, they circle it and work on it as a family.  Would this approach work for math?

I went to my favorite Used Book Store – Roberts, set to find a book for math help.  Well, whatdoyaknow?  A math books with my name on it!!! Ya.  Well I sat to read it, Nathan asked to read it, and we found that we understood what Mark Zagarelli was saying. He taught us how to get the fractions to have the same denominator in a SIMPLE way. Duh. Simple for Dummies.  We liked it so much I looked him up to see what else he would offer and found the workbook.  For the last week or so, Saxon 7.6 has been on the shelf and Nate and I have been working through the fractions sections of these books.  WOO HOO.  We are finally getting it. And understanding, not just memorizing.

We took a trip to the Hatfield Marine Science Center – and found a dictionary as well.  I think we will keep these two books on the shelf to help when we get stuck.  There are not enough problems in the workbook to actually have it last for long, but enough to get the hang of a new formula. Hey if its good enough for the folks at OSU – 🙂

Have you found a way to get through fractions?  Let us know!