Grade 1 Addition

Complete breakdown of the book.This does not deserve the 1-star ratings a few have given it. In order to enjoy higher levels of math, you need a rock solid foundation of basic skills. That requires practice and lots of repetition, to the brink of boredom (hopefully not too far over the brink). If your child knows some of this book already, thank yourself or your teacher or both, please don’t yell at the book. Hands down, this was the best book for my child out of all of the ones we’ve used so far.This is great for beginning kindergartners, but you’ll likely spend additional time reworking the handwriting sections like we did. Think of it as real lessons (with much help and guidance from yourself) that will eventually transition into unguided practice somewhere around the middle of the book. And you should be patient and not try to get through the book quickly. For a first grader, I suspect this is probably supplementary practice material and will require little to no guidance from parents, but I don’t really know because she isn’t in that grade yet. I wouldn’t skip the handwriting section unless you absolutely know they don’t need it. A teacher has around 30 kids and may watch your child form their numbers for only minutes out of the year, if even that. Nothing wrong with spending an hour or two of your time to make sure they have a lifelong skill taken care of.I’m going to break down the sections so you can understand how I used it. To be clear, if my child’s success was due mainly to some innate ability, then I wouldn’t bother reviewing the book, but the reality is the book’s organization and approach deserves a ton of the credit. I am convinced that the majority of children will have similar experiences as long as they are moving at their own pace and get the guidance they need. One or two sessions a week was a good pace for us because she has nightly homework, music lessons, gymnastics, … you know the drill. Time off to play is critical. Approximately 15-30 minutes per chunk, regardless if that was half a lesson or several lessons. If it’s more towards half a lesson, then I would stay close to 15 minutes so they don’t become overwhelmed or exhausted from the difficulty of it. If they are flying through the stuff, let them revel in it until they start to lose their concentration. That’s around 30 minutes right now for my kid. I may sound like a slave driver because of how detailed I am with all of it. The way it actually works, though, is hand holding through completely new concepts and lots of patience and praise. If they don’t get it, don’t move on, try another day using a different approach. For concepts already understood, I let her do it herself and just hung around doing something else quietly in the room. If she got frustrated, I would help talk her out of the frustration and to refocus and not be so upset that something is hard. If she couldn’t drop the frustration, I turned it into a lesson on one or two topics that needed to be gone over the most and then ended the session for the day, not worrying about finishing the page. Most of the true emphasis was on pattern finding; the actual addition just takes care of itself in this book.The first lessons are tracing large numbers, following the arrows so that you are forming them properly. It immediately starts to shrink the box size over the next several lessons and ends with the appropriate writing size for 1st grade. It also introduces the counting dot groups that you see on all standardized tests. There is a smooth transition into the counting system, which progresses from filling in a basic group of 10 in various rows, followed by straight down a column, followed by the middle of one row to the middle of the next row, followed by various randomized or different patterns. Progressive and systematic. Easy. During this stage, I had my child redo numbers that needed handwriting practice, going back to the tracing sections for specific numbers until her muscle memory improved.Use the counting sections to constantly find patterns. For example, when filling down a column, have them recognize that the 1’s space stays the same and the 10’s space increases by 1’s versus rows where the 10’s space stays the same and the 1’s space increases. Have them point out any other patterns they see, regardless of how simple or how many times they’ve seen it before. Page 27 #4 was an especially good pattern for this age – I asked her to predict the next two numbers and she easily got it even though it was the only time that specific pattern was used. That is because we took advantage of the basic patterns used earlier in the book. The final counting lesson (#14) pushes up to 120, so students understand how to continue the counting system beyond the standard stopping point of 100. I graded her based on her quality of handwriting, making her take as much time as necessary to make it look as good as she could. I slowly increased my standards to push her progress, but tried to be realistic about what a kindergartner’s hands can do.After that, they will write the number that comes next, using an arrow as a designator. It quickly transitions between the arrow and the more traditional ‘x 1 =’ system. They will learn that addition is simply an extension of the counting system. Then there are many pages of practice and that is the point: repetition creates mastery. It does this again with 2’s, then 3’s, and so on, but each additional number uses less and less pages of practice because it is an easy transition from one step to the next. We always found patterns afterwards; for example, if one number is held constant and the other other number being added to it increases by 1, then the answers must also increase by 1. Basic, but very important. I don’t point them out directly. I ask her to find them, sometimes using guiding questions, and then we work together to create a statement that is mathematically clear; you can sneak words into their vocabulary like row, column, constant, diagonal, …Grading was important. If she got something wrong, I would tell her how many were incorrect, but she would have to find them. She got half credit back for each one she fixed. If she still missed one after the check, then no credit, but we went over them carefully until she had it down. Sloppy handwriting wasn’t counted as incorrect unless it was totally unreadable, but I made her erase and redo anything that she obviously didn’t put a good effort behind. The emphasis was on effort made, not getting the writing perfect. All lessons were untimed from her perspective. I did time them occasionally to see how she was progressing. I allowed her to use her fingers, but encouraged her to try not to. By the end of the book, she was mostly done with that crutch.She really wanted 100%. She didn’t always get it and this book helped her to understand that it isn’t possible to get 100% all the time, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t good at it. Early on in the addition section (adding 2) she tried to bang out two consecutive lessons as fast as possible and scored a 70-something and an 80-something. She was disappointed. Our discussions on what good effort means finally hit home for her. She improved her focus and stopped racing. I also changed my standard that I would not check her work until she had checked it herself first. I didn’t place much emphasis on the grade after the lesson (I was really doing it so that she wold be used to the idea of being graded), but she saw it as a challenge, so I took advantage of that and used it to improving her concentration skills such as filtering out distractors and such. Still, under no circumstances did I allow it to be a negative experience; we worked through it until it was always a positive experience, using the concept of continuous growth.By the end of the book, she was confidently adding 16 12, 13 13, 15 13, 12 13, 9 14, … 50 of those, in her head (no fingers for counting), good handwriting, 100% accuracy in 58 seconds (give or take a few seconds). That’s what this book does if you take full advantage. Totally worth it. In all, we spent about 7 months on this book, moving at a casual pace and supplementing it with other skills such as mazes, money, time, logic, writing, science… mostly from those 1st grade practice books every bookstore has. The outcome is what I care about, not how quickly we get there.