Homeschool World Forum

What is, in my humble opinion, THE single best math resource for ages 2-7? Read on...

I teach high school math in suburban St. Paul, MN. I see kids in high school every day who are mathematically HOBBLED and sometimes even CRIPPLED... simply because they still have never mastered their basic arithmetic facts - especially the multiplication facts.

Multiplication is the foundation for things way beyond sheer fact recall - it forms the basis for number sense, for estimation, for mental math, for algebraic factoring, and for other operations in higher math such as binomial expansion, power functions, exponential functions, and both derivatives and integrals of polynomial functions!

So what is THE best math resource for ages 2-7? The skill of skip counting, which is best taught using skip counting songs. This resource can be found at my website at www.AlgebraForKids.com where you can click on the link to "Audio Tapes & CD's" to order some of these. If you have kids ages 2-7, please DON'T cripple them for advanced math by failing to have them master basic math facts.

Bob Hazen

Not to detract from your post in any way, but I'd like to list a second resource as well, Barnum Quartermile. We've used this a lot for lower level math drills, and it massively increases your computation speed and memorization of basic math facts, while being quite addictive and fun. If your children are more visual than audio-based, this may the better choice.

Number Munchers was also quite fun, though it's a DOS-based game and you have to install a DOS simulator to run it at this point.

As an educator, I also have always stressed mastery of the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. I also realized that unless the facts are automatic, children will have difficulty learning more advanced math skills and with solving word math. My suggestion to anyone teaching the math facts is to first determine which facts the child knows automatically, that is without hesitation. Make a pack of cards for each of those correctly answered facts. Each day, have the children answer those facts and praise them for being able to answer quickly. Then assign a few new facts to learn, and repeat the process so that over time, all of the facts will be mastered. When the stack of cards becomes too large to do all every day, separate the newest ones from the mastered ones and then practice the mastered ones only once a week.