KUMON - do you believe in it?

[yvonnemommy]

Hi! My girl is 5 yr. She didn?t use Kumon. She is always using beestar.org. Beestar is a great online web site. It offers curricular-based exercises of math, English language art, science, etc. These exercises are very interesting, full of interesting stories, pictures, and also many practical problems. My daughter loves them very much.:yeah2
Nicole

 

[wanfamily]

Hi Mushi and Milkmonster,
Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you about the articles. I have found them, but they are hard copy. You are welcome to borrow them as long as i get them back though. (Please PM me if you'd like to ) Alternatively, if you do a search on the lecturer, Dr. Constance Kami, I know a lot of her stuff is published in maths journals etc on line. She also has a few books out. Her stuff isn't exacty bed time reading, but has solid suggestions on how to help children think mathematically using games etc. The conference wasn't on Kumon, but on early childhood development in math and Dr. Kami was a student of Piaget - anyone who works in early childhood education has to study him. The 'benefits' of Kumon actually came up in the questions and her reply was that Kumon is not recognised by the government (in Japan anyway) as a viable math programme. The philosophy behind Kumon is speed/ procedures first, understanding later. My opinion (and every other teacher that I have discussed this with) is that speed without understanding is hollow. Feel free to make up your own mind!

 

[MilkMonster]

Thanks wanfamily! I will have a look online and see what I can find.

tflynn, I think in your case, you have buy-in from your son which is really important and helps in getting a positive outcome.

 

[val23]

Any other math centers?

Hi All,

My son just started Kumon Math. I just saw what they had to do and thought it to be unideal and yes, tedious.

Does anybody know of any Math Centers that teach more practical stuff?

Thanks

 

[meganx]

Hi! My girl is 5 yr. She didn?t use Kumon. She is always using beestar.org. Beestar is a great online web site. It offers curricular-based exercises of math, English language art, science, etc. These exercises are very interesting, full of interesting stories, pictures, and also many practical problems. My daughter loves them very much.:yeah2
Nicole

Hi, we are also using Beestar now. I sent James to Kumon once, but he didn't like the place and the teaching style. He was always crying when doing school work. We gave up Kumon, and were recommended Beestar. He started the free math in Beestar last year, and gradually likes the 10 quick questions every week. He also loves to see his name on the honor roll. We are happy to see his progress with math.

 

[rani]

I bought a few Kumon books for my son, and I have noticed an improvement in his Maths. We're only doing a couple of pages a day.

He's going into Y3 at ESF, and the kids are being taught to add and subtract two and three digit numbers in their head. Which is hard for most adults, why would they except kids to do this? We've showed him how to stack numbers and tackle one column at a time. He's definitely a lot more confident, and he gets only 3 or 4 wrong vs the 10+ when he was doing them in his head.

 

[viyaya]

My daughter went to Kumon beforee but I don't see it is making any progress. She seems to be losing interest on math. That's why we changed to use Beestar, it found out some topics my child really likes and good at, we also found the weakness that we are taking time to focus on and improve. Beestar really a good online program.

 

[tang]

My daughter went to Kumon beforee but I don't see it is making any progress. She seems to be losing interest on math. That's why we changed to use Beestar, it found out some topics my child really likes and good at, we also found the weakness that we are taking time to focus on and improve. Beestar really a good online program.

I agree, every child has a different learning style. There's a psychometric test I found that helped me find out my kid's learning style, and decided to send him to a play-based tuition class instead of Kumon. He's making lots of progress there. The test is called PsychUp Education, hope its useful as it was for me.