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Homeschool World Forum • Timed drills?
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Timed drills?

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 9:07 pm
by gellegbs
How do you grade a timed drill? I hate to use that word grade but how do you know how much your child has learned?

Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 5:14 am
by seekingmyLord
I will not be of much help maybe, but I recently started doing timed drills using Calculadder. There is a progress chart, but does not "grade" in the conventional sense. I noticed that Timberdoodle has a closeout special on the Calculadder Masterpak CDs, just in case anyone is interested.

Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 7:38 am
by Lily
Um, I don't know. We don't use timed drills here. It's easy to know how much he learned by how many questions he has and how often he uses the blocks. If he's confident and can teach me, he knows it.

Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:48 pm
by Theodore
Shouldn't be that hard. If the number of problems solved within x amount of time goes up, and accuracy stays the same, there's improvement. If the number of problems solved stays the same and accuracy goes up, there's also improvement.

Timed drills are basically just a way to train yourself to be accurate with limited time and maybe stress. It's no good to be able to solve problems on your own if you fall to pieces every time you're put in a real-life situation. It's training for college.

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:04 am
by Lily

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 8:43 pm
by seekingmyLord
Lily, this may not agree with your own homeschool philosophy, but I think some children love timed drills and I believe that they do prepare children to call up information quickly and under a bit of pressure, which happens in real life situations even for a 6yo--at least, it does for my 6yo when we go shopping.

There maybe no timed drills in college, but there are timed tests last I knew. I don't know about the drills other do, but ours are under 5 minutes working towards 2 minutes. That is a rather short time. I don't see the harm in training a child to prepare for test taking, but then I live in a state that requires us to test our children.

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 10:12 pm
by Lily

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 1:35 am
by Theodore
Practice makes perfect, and like it or not, high school and college will involve a lot of testing. You can either follow an ideal, or you can practice hard and get straight A's - it's your choice. Test-taking is an acquired skill. And yes, a lot of children (certainly those with alpha personalities) thrive on competition. Just because you may not enjoy drills yourself, doesn't necessarily mean your children won't, especially if you enter them in math competitions and they get to see how the drills pay off.

All of my math-based courses in college involved timed exams. Every single one. And what about the SAT, ACT, required yearly testing (depending on your state), etc? What about certification for a job? Life is full of tests.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 8:29 am
by Lily

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 9:38 am
by Mathmom
I have to agree with Lily on this one. The original question was "How do you know when they have learned the facts using these timed drills?"(or something like that.
Actually, I learned quite a bit about how young children learn math, in the past couple of years, mostly from Ruth Beechick's booklets on the 3R's (An Easy Start in Arithmetic). The first mode of thinking you go through is the manipulative mode, with real objects that can be moved around, added and grouped.
The transition mode is where you can think in pictures of objects, then symbolic pictures(like dots).
Then comes the mental image mode where they can think about touchable objects (example would be word problems, like, you have one cookie and I have 2 cookies, so we have 1 + 2 = 3 cookies.

Lastly, the symbolic mode comes, where they do the math facts found in the drills they were talking about.

I had never heard of these modes, however, they are important, and worth reading about before you get too far into doing math together. It cuts the frustration way down.
So, look for Ruth Beechick's booklet set called "The Three R's".


Another place I found this information was a booklet from Mary Hood, Phd., called "Taking the Frustration Out of Math". She has some suggestions for games and books to use in the different modes. Her website where you can find out more information and order her booklet is:
http://www.archersforthelord.org
Mary avoided math, she says all the way up until she was an adult, thinking she could never master it. She learned about the modes you need to go through and after that she did all her math up to Algebra. So, it is never too late to learn math, and if you learn along with your child, you will help them, and yourself.
I know that learning with your child is good because when my son wanted a challenge, I had him learn some arithmetic tricks, and we did some mental math. Now, we like to do math in our head, and only do calculators for the times it's a complex problem.
How do I know he is learning it? I give him a mental math problem. He gives me the answer. Then, I ask him how he got the answer, and he tells me. Many times he comes up with the answer in a different way than how I got it.
Well, I hope this will help somebody. Thanks for letting me share it with you.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 3:48 pm
by Theodore
You homeschool rather than public school not to eliminate testing, but to give your children a more efficient education, free of liberal propaganda. Public school covers a lot of useless or even bad material, and with class sizes of 40+ students, your children are stuck there for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, with almost no one-on-one interaction with the teacher. That's why you homeschool.

I still fail to see what's horrible about timed drills. Testing per se should be limited, but math drills are educational. I suppose you're also against typing practice?

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:11 pm
by Lily

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:23 pm
by Theodore

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 9:35 pm
by Lily

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:56 pm
by Ramona