Thank you for creating this curriculum.
I have a daughter who was told in first grade that she is not a math kid, that singing and dancing were her talent. As a math major, I was horrified. It took me another year to find your curriculum. I chose it because it taught patterns with an abacus and I was teaching Chinese numbers anyways. My daughter is a tactile learner and abstraction takes practice for her. We started with Level B and did every lesson.
She is now in fifth grade and being told that she is a math whiz. This is ridiculous on so many levels, I will not list them all. She is a normal kid like all the other normal kids. Schools have stopped teaching math and use testing to both teach and assess. This is wrong.
I have spoken with so many parents who are pressured into having their children “practice” timed tests – sometimes six a day!! How harmful it must be for children to have their fear of failure confirmed six times every day. I have referred many parents to your curriculum; but, parents also have their own fear of math. They truly believe that it takes a math specialist to teach math.
I have also purchased Right Start materials for my kids’ teachers. I am teaching Right Start in both the third and fifth grade classrooms this year. The kids respond with amazing enthusiasm to even 90 minutes of math! These are kids who commonly have school days where teachers have said that there is “no time to do math.” The mental math of addition and strategies is so good for even the fifth graders. Especially the ones who have resigned thmselves to just not being “mathy.” I can see that little glimmer of “Hey, maybe I can do math” in their eyes when we are doing questions like 49 + 105 without ever writing anything down. And it is teaching them such an intuitive feel for place value and numbers in general. Love it!
So, I thank you for your hard work in this. I think it is a great product. I wish it were promoted more in mainstream traditional teaching. I have been thinking of writing this thank you note for the last three years; so, I feel I can’t say THANK YOU enough times!
THANK YOU !!!
