Homeschool Curriculum Packages for Math

I can hear you asking yourself, "Why is there an entire section devoted to math?" That is a good question, and one that has a couple of different (and hopefully good) answers.

First, of all the subjects that need to be taught in homeschool the one that causes parents the most anxiety overall is math. When facing the task of teaching math many parents start thinking negative thoughts like "I don't know how to teach math. Heck, I don't even remember the math I learned." I personally believe that lot of this comes from our youth when we were taught the false idea that certain people were "math" people and others weren't. But no matter what the cause, the fact is that most homeschool parents can benefit from a dose of encouragement when it comes to teaching mathematics.

Second, while we all recognize how importance teaching our children mathematics, in the various homeschool approaches that exist math tends to end up being the odd man out. Reading, history, language arts, art, and even science can all fall naturally in the framework of a unit study, but finding a unit studies that teach fractions (for example) can be difficult. Similarly there are few living books that have math as a central theme. In these cases we need to supplement the primary course of study with a math curriculum.

In the following pages we describe the two major approaches to teaching math (Mastery vs Spiral) and the advantages and disadvantages of each. We conclude with a set of suggestions for additional resources. These resources are broken out by the two major approaches.

Mastery Math >>