success story

I found out yesterday that another of my kids in Singapore Math moved up to Phase 4!

I had 6 kids who attended pretty regularly, at least one of whom was already in Phase 4 (not sure about 1 other). Two kids were in Phase 3, and 1 might have been in PHase 2.

Two of the Phase 3 kids moved up to Phase 4! One mother told me this was definitely because of the class, and I believe it. That's the boy I think I've mentioned before, the one who loved the bar models. He decided he was good at math, and then voila. He became good at math.

I just found out about the other boy yesterday, when I ran into his mom. She said her son was doing so well in his math class that he was helping all the other kids, and finally the teacher said it didn't make sense for him to stay in 3.

She said two aspects of the after-school class affected him:

• I opened with a little lecture about how in Singapore they don't think math has to be hard from the beginning. They start out with super-easy problems (I said 'super-easy') and they work up to hard ones. Then I told the kids that the Singapore books would look too easy to them, but that's the way the Singapore teachers do it. Start easy, work up to hard.

His mom had told me last year that her son had been quoting this to her ever since--and apparently he is still using this principle, and has started to discover the 'work a simpler version of the problem' idea himself. He has incorporated this idea--very easy working up to very hard--as a core intellectual concept! (That makes me so happy.)

• mental math

His mom said she can see him using the principle of mental math--which I think some here have called 'number partitioning'--constantly. She feels that because of the mental math we did, he has a constant sense that numbers can be 'broken apart' and 'rearranged' in different ways--_and_ that you should break up numbers and rearrange them if that will help you solve a problem.

Boy, that made my day.

I told her her son should come back and be my teaching assistant this year. I wish he would.


2 Singapore Math Class kids move to Phase 4
another student moves to Phase 4

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