Homeschool: Math

I was lucky to get a complete 2nd grade Houghton-Mifflin math curriculum from Jeff's cousin after she did her student teaching, so that's the text that Sarah is using this year. Since I want to keep it "clean" for Lauren to eventually use, we're either

• answering verbally
• writing the answers into a notebook
• photocopies
  
• making a facsimile with Word or Excel, then printing it for Sarah to write on

There is a long stretch of several chapters that don't deal much with plain addition and subtraction. These include Place Value; Plane Shapes; Data, Graphing and Probability; and Fractions. Last spring, we had started doing addition with regrouping ("carrying") along with the regular addition & subtraction, but this book doesn't get to that until Chapter 10. It bugs me a little to wait that long, but I committed to this book, so I'm not going to skip anything to get there faster.

But there's no way I'm going to ignore addition & subtraction until the book gets back there. We didn't practice much over the summer, and when we started up again in the fall, she had a hard time with 3+6= _____. So besides working in the textbook, we have addition & subtraction practice every day. I try for it to be short--usually no more than 10 minutes, and frequently much less. She's getting better, even if she still looks at her fingers for assistance more than I'd like. I know that eventually, she won't need that.

Practice options include (I'd usually rather she do something on the computer than print more paper):

• a printed worksheet (generator)
• Math Magician
• CyberChallenge
  
• Leon's Math Dojo
• flashcards
• Math Minutes
• Mathblox
• Blackboard Math
• Tic Tac Toe
• problems written on the white board
• Leon Math Movies
  

We also like Brain Teasers, even though they aren't specifically addition & subtraction.