Literacy and Math all-in-oneMy daughter was having difficulty at school with her schools quick 10 (a series of math question given to the children first thing in the morning). The simple addition and subtraction she had no problem with, but the questions that required sentence comprehension (e.g. Johnny has six apples, Mary has four apples. How many apples are there altogether?) were just beyond her.Having successfully used other KUMON books to improve her Math, I decided to invest in this, and I am glad that I did.As with all of the KUMON books it starts simply, and included pictures so the child can use those to count, but within 10-lessons these pictures are gone, and the child must think about the questions and extract the mathematical equation themselves.The questions cover both addition (Person A has 10 x, person B has 3 x. How many x?), and subtraction (C has 7 y, D has 4 y. How many more y does C have?) so that the child can get a good understanding of working out both. Later in the book it moves on to Ordinal numbers (E is in a line, there are 4 people in front of them. What position is E?), so gives a good grounding.The literacy side of the book is good too since the questions are all written long form, the child has to read, understand and decipher the problem which naturally improves their reading comprehension skills.Although progression through the book is slow (on purpose) this works in their favour and is quite contrary to the current teaching approach of touching on a subject for a short period and then coming back to it. This is all about getting the basics right first.As an introduction to reality based math (rather than the pure abstract) this is an excellent introduction, and I would recommend it to any parent who is seeing their child struggle with this kind of problem.
