Mammoth: Making Math Easy

It’s all my fault. I admit it.  My eldest daughter is having problems with math right now because I changed direction and confused the heck out of her. I was snared in the siren’s song of cyber-schooling and now I’m doing damage control.  See, when I started teaching my daughter math I made if fun, practical and entertaining. When I hooked up the cyberschools they made it worksheets, boring, and repetitious. And that just doesn’t work for a blue child — I should know since I’m blue too! And the cyber-curriculum has created a division of education amongst the girls. Under my own regime (another aspect of my emancipation!) everyone pretty much learned at the same time with mild adjustment for age and attention span, of course.

But now I’m back into traditional homeschooling and I’m feeling great about it.  Except for getting my little girl back into loving math. Well, that was until I stumbled upon Mammoth Math Clock while hanging out at Currclick the other day. I was looking for a resource to build up my eldest child’s ability to tell time. If you ask her what time it is she can tell you, but since she can’t explain how she figured it out I translatethis as a need for more practice.  since if you should be able to teach something to others once you really know it.  Her little sister is just learning to tell time. so I was looking for something that will kill two birds with one stone.  And Mammoth Math Clock is the answer for us.

For one thing, Maria Miller’s approach to math is a simple one.  Work on one concept at time and build upon it. Her mathbooks don’t have a lot of colorful pictures, cute jokes or other distractions that has made Jade’s cyberschooling math experience so rocky. Just simple explanations, short practice examples to complete and move on to the next component.  This approach makes it easy to include children from different age groups. Ms. Miller also includes a load of online and offline resources you can tap into if you want to expand the lessons or your child needs more practice.

Let me give you one example. In the beginning she only uses the hour hand to teach the children how they can tell time.  She shows them how the position of the hour hand will tell them if the time is a whole hour or a half hour. She gives some illustrations and then it’s the child’s turn to tell time.  The beauty of this system, at least for my kids, is that they are onlyconcentrating on one thing.  There is no confusion about which hand they’re working with. Jade sometimes would confuse the minute and hour hand — now there’s no confusion. My six year old got it immediately and has never experienced the confusion of which is which.  When we moved on to the second lesson, the minute hand was intoduced, but the focus was only on the quarter and half hours. And so on and so forth.

My kids loved the fact that once they finished a section, they “knew” what time it was and how to manage the clock. Jade now confidently tells the time and explains how she knows — no more nervous glances at me to see if she’s on the right track or not. And her little sister, Alaya, enjoys telling me “Mommy it’s 2:35 p.m.” (or whatever the time may be when she gets into her silly mode).  And best of all, for me, is that I’m done teaching how to tell time for at least 2 more years!  We’re moving into the Mammoth Blue Series now.  I’ll be doing Addition and Subtraction with the ladies before moving on to Multiplication and Division.

And I’ll get to teach them both at one time freeing up time for me to work on other things during the day. And maybe even carve out some more time for fun and games. Yeah!

If you’d like to learn more about Mammoth Math, you can visit www.mammothmath.com and sign up for Maria Miller’s newsletter, free math worksheets and software.  She has a great deal where you buy even one of her workbooks and you get free math software for the kids!

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