I’m so excited to write Discover Teaching Textbooks, A Review for you all! Until we found Teaching Textbooks a few years back, teaching math in our homeschool journey was filled with struggles and even tears, (tears were mostly mine)! I’m working on a post detailing our math journey and why you should not “freak out” (like I did at times) if your kid is not getting math. But first I wanted to give reviews of the two math curriculum’s we found that we absolutely LOVE in our homeschool!
Discover Teaching Textbooks, A Review
In this post I’ll focus on Teaching Textbooks (TT) since we found it first. TT is considered a college prep math curriculum according to Cathy Duffy Reviews HERE, and is available in CD ROM format as well as workbooks and online. The CD ROM and online versions do everything from teaching the lesson through grading. I cannot begin to express how wonderful this is! This much help teaching ANY subject is handy, especially if you are teaching multiple children. But help teaching a subject that you haven’t loved teaching in times past is especially worth bonus points!
If you only use the CD’s then it’s non consumable. If you use the book to write in that is all you would have to replace for other children if you have more than one you are homeschooling.
Another nice feature, if your child is having trouble grasping a concept and you’ve tried to explain it till you are blue in the face and they still don’t get it, no worries! Teaching Textbooks has teachers on standby. All you have to do is call them and a teacher will walk your child through the problem. Since the lessons are all pretty easy to understand we have only had to call in one time in four years.
You’ll be happy to know that if your kid is struggling with a concept, helping them succeed is not too hard. First, if you see that your child gets a few problems wrong (or in our case hear the mournful meltdowns-our kids are quite dramatic and despise getting more than two problems in a lesson wrong) you can go into the a parent dashboard, delete and reassign the problems, or the entire lesson (warning-deleting the entire lesson results in mega mournful meltdowns depending on their age), and then you can go into the child’s part of the program and work with your child to discover exactly what they are having issues grasping.
Recently one of the boys was having trouble understanding rounding to 10’s. There were multiple places he was disconnecting. We had to reassign the lesson three times (he was a combination of furious and dismal because he’s used to grasping math concepts quickly and perhaps a little proud of that). So we had a little character lesson thrown in with the math lesson about how it’s okay to struggle at times and it’s not the end of the world!
Anyways, I had to get creative to help him understand the concept- but we took our time (a very important math lesson in itself that we had to learn the hard way-but more on that later) and eventually he got it.
Okay, so I’ve heard some people try to say that Teaching Textbooks is a half a grade behind, I’ve also heard some try to claim that it is too easy/has holes. I was concerned about this so I looked into it. I do believe this assessment is mistaken based off of what I found.
Yes, it does run around half a grade behind (if you are still getting hung up on grades (here’s an article about why it’s better for your kids education for you stop worrying about that).
But, according to parents that STUCK WITH THE PROGRAM all the way through and didn’t bail on it, they claim blanks were eventually filled in. TT just doesn’t do them in the order or time frame some people expect it to.
Also, I’ve read threads of testimony’s from parents who used the curriculum from start to finish and they claim Teaching Textbooks did a great job preparing their kids for college, and it helped their kids get excellent GPA’s on their final exams and/or GED’s. They emphasized that you just can’t bail on the program through the middles school years, and that it does pick up.
Our experience with TT so far-our oldest child is ADHD, and I’m relatively positive he has dyscalculia, and so for a couple years he moved through it more slowly. On the positive side, TT is the first math curriculum we’ve tried for him that he gets, and recently he plowed through an entire grade in 6 months. This was the first math curriculum that made him not hate math-in fact he went from finding math a misery to enjoying it and wanting to know more about it-he’s even begun researching concepts he is interested in beyond his grade level. If you ask me that right there is a major win!
The second child moves through some parts quickly and some slowly. She enjoys math most the time. Lately she has been interested in what her big brother is learning-she’s very competitive and I think she’s going to try to catch up with him!
The youngest is a math wiz and is flying through. He seems to be enjoying the program (he recently started the program and is in 3rd grade).
Speaking of which, the disadvantage is it does not start until 3rd grade so you have to find something else from pre-k through second. Soon I’ll be reviewing what we use from pre-K through second grade. You won’t want to miss that post because what we use is AMAZING and the reason I believe my younger sons are turning into math wiz’s!
If you enjoyed Discover Teaching Textbooks, A Review, be sure to check out my review of Math U See’s new AIM program, it’s the best thing we’ve found for teaching math facts!
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