Math 1
Math 1: Commercial Curricula
If you are using an Old Fashioned Education (OFE) or Ambleside Online (AO) curriculum you will need to select a math program. Here are some ideas for you. I’ve grouped them under three main rubrics: 1) commercially available math curricula, 2) free math curricula and textbooks, 3) interactive math games and helpful printables. Except for the first category items, all the math resources on these pages are available free of charge. This may be helpful to you if you are starting out, even if not on a tight budget. Sometimes it may take a couple tries to find a curriculum that is a good fit for both you and your children!
As far as manipulatives are concerned, I suggest you look around your home and get creative! You can buy fancy sets of manipulatives but may find they are not much better than what you have already at home - or what you could have made or purchased at a garage sale or dollar store. Ideas for manipulatives include: bottle caps, bingo markers, poker chips, Lego, wooden blocks, coins, drinking straws, etc. These can all be turned into counters, but with a little imagination you can use them to teach operations, fractions, place value, etc. Or try virtual manipulatives! National Library of Virtual Manipulatives has a full range of interactive manipulatives for grades K-9. You can also find printable charts, graph paper, counters, and much more online at any of a hundred web sites. Just use your favourite search engine!
We do like our Cuisenaire™ rods (free printable version), and they are quite helpful if you are going to being using Miquon Math. At roughly $10-$15 for a starter set this is one manipulative that is worth investing in. If you are using a program that leans more on base-10 blocks look into these instead. Both the rods and the blocks are quite flexible in terms of what you can teach with them. Homeschool suppliers and teacher’s stores should be able to offer you a good selection of both.
Popular Homeschool Math Programs
Living Math is completely non-traditional, and uses living books to teach rather than textbooks or worksheets. The book lists can all be downloaded free, but Ms Brennan asks that parents consider purchasing books through her Amazon affiliate account if they use the lists without the pay lesson plans. Subscriptions that allow access to the lesson plans are very affordable, but do keep in mind that the books must then be obtained. If you are able to find them from the library, so much the better. But if you have to buy a lot of the books it will add to the cost of using this program.
Living Math is designed by a homeschooling parent, to be used with multi-age groups. Lesson plans & book lists are available for three levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced/High School. Each level goes through the same subjects during the same time frame. There are 32 lessons, grouped into four historical periods from ancient to modern times (C1). A second set of 32 lessons examines math through the biographies of mathematicians (C2). While a complete list of books for C1 is available, the C2 books don’t appear to be on the site. There are also a great many books listed by subject, as well as books specifically recommended for beginning to use living books in math teaching. A great many other resources are also available on the site, so check it out!
Subscription rates for the lesson plans are $20 USD per quarter for one level, or $40 USD per quarter for access to all three levels. The program is self-paced and can be used as a complete curriculum or a supplement. If you have questions about how to teach math without the drills and memorizing and worksheets, articles are provided to help you learn more. There is a restricted access forum, and there are quizzes offered for those who feel they need these.
This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks! Graphic courtesy Clipsahoy - it’s much appreciated!
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