Math Year 7 -- Ray's Higher Arithmetic

I hope that anyone who reads this blog doesn't mind me using it as a notebook for half-plans for the next few weeks. I am a bit embarrassed because most bloggers who share their plans seem to have nice, almost-ready-to-publish layouts and this here will be more like the sort of thing I scribble in my homeschool spiral. By the time I finish I hope I will have some tailored FORMS to show for it but this is the very beginning stage, and people like me seem to have to do a lot of swirly head-work up front in order to end up with nice, practical, substantial things in the final stage.

First of all, yesterday I worked on Math. After venting on my homeschooljournal and getting some advice from Faith, I realized that she was so very right -- making nice creative plans depends quite a bit on the temperamental muse, but in the meantime there is no reason why I can't start pinning down the framework at least.

I have an ambitious goal in mind for Math 7-- to use "Ray's Higher Arithmetic" and make it work. Of course, this depends partly on my student, but my goal is to learn to do my part. I ALWAYS have to tweak whatever math program we use, so I might as well start with one I like. Ray's is not exactly the typical modern math series, so I never have had the courage to actually try to use it as a main resource. But this year is different -- no babies, only 2 grades to teach. I might actually have time to do more behind the scenes work.

I have been going through the beginning part of Ray's with my Y6 son at the end of this year just to see if we can manage it. So far so good. We got through the chapters on Addition and Subtraction.

What I am thinking right now is that we will review multiplication and division this summer. Then in September we can start with chapter VII -- Properties of Numbers.

Things to Think About:

• How to teach the definitions and other material at the beginning of the chapters.
• What to skip (some of the archaic business math things -- I can replace with a more modern time of consumer math)
• What else to include -- I'd like to supplement with online quizzes and interactive games, and some of the books from Living Math.
  
• How to manage review and reinforcement. Ignatian Education has a review after introduction of a concept, daily review at the beginning of the lesson, a weekly review, and a term review. I am planning to try it this way, next year. As the book points out, review is not just boring drill -- it should look at the subject in a new light, big picture or focus on detail.
  

Here is a very general outline:

• Chapter VII Properties
• Chapter VIII Common Fractions
• Chapter IX Decimal Fractions
• Chapter X Circulating Decimals
• Chapter XI Compound Denominate Numbers
• Chapter XII Ratio
• Chapter XIII Proportion

For each chapter I estimate 1 month except for Chapter XI which will take closer to 2 months, and I hope to consolidate XII and XIII into 1 month.

Math 7 overview here.