Free Singapore Math Problems

[Kris Murphy]

Hi everyone,

I am a father of 9-year-old twins whom I am homeschooling. I am using the Singapore math curriculum which I find to be excellent.

Singapore math is gaining popularity worldwide. But there are very few math websites offering Singapore math problems.

Having been educated in Singapore up to high school (I got my degree in psychology from the University of Toronto), I decided to rectify this. I created a website with thousands of Singapore math problems accompanied by 3D clip art and zany, challenging questions. There are other educational resources for you too. And they are all FREE!

A word of warning - many of these questions are really, really tough!

Hope your kids like them!

Please give me your feedback.

Best Wishes,
Kris Murphy

http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/m ... blems.html

[susanrm]

Kris, I reviewed your website and sent you a message. Your website seems to be mostly set up as a money-making scheme. The problems are structured in connection with the Singapore curriculum, but they are too wordy with too much distracting, extraneous verbiage that seems to be connected to generating more keywords for web searches.

In addition, the main strength of Singapore word problems over others is the model drawing approach. Yet there are no examples of model drawing problems or solutions on your site.

Also, you have download links for the problems - but they don't lead to worksheets, just to additional web pages with more ads. This is misleading.

For these reasons, I can't add your website to my site with many Singapore resources. I recommend purchasing the Word Problems for Model Drawing Practice, available here - http://crystalspringsbooks.com/singapore-math.html - instead.

For more resources for Singapore problem solving, including websites that let you practice, visit my website at http://susanmidlarsky.com. No ads!

[Kris Murphy]

Dear Susan,

Thanks for the blunt feedback.

Yes, I do know that my website contains extra keywords for the search engines. And the introduction is a tad too long.

Why the wordy introduction for each page? That is because new visitors could arrive from the search engines into any page.

And please do check the links to the word problems again, Susan. You will find that the questions are below the introduction.

Parents have the option of using my website, which is TOTALLY FREE with thousands of free Singapore math questions, or they could, if they want, subscribe to AdaptedMind which is an Amercian math program.

And Susan, you promised no ads?

You do use your website to make money by offering tutoring services. Let's not get overly sanctimonious here. I don't sell anything of my own. I just advertise Google AdSense, and I have just been trying out AdaptedMind for the past 2 months.

Anyway, I know that you are genuinely trying to help your visitors by providing all that wonderful resources for them. Yours is a great site and I love it!

Cheers,
Kris Murphy

[Kris Murphy]

Dear Susan,

I just opened my email. Thanks for sending to my email address some extra ideas. I especially like your suggestion that I should create PDF versions for my worksheets.

I intend to do just that!

And I do have other articles and educational resources too such as for phonics, parenting and homeschooling.

Thanks again and best wishes,
Kris

http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/

[susanrm]

Kris, thanks for the reply. My issue isn't so much about the keywords and ads on the general pages, but about the keywords *within* the word problems themselves. I just can't see offering these to my students to work on. Example:

"Jara and Bara are gravediggers who love to collect moldy skulls and steal First Grade Math Worksheets. Jara has 8 skulls. Bara has 4 more skulls than Jara. How many skulls does Bara have?"

Re my website: it is set up to give parents and schools information about the services I offer. That's its entire purpose in life. I offer no third-party ads. I thought that would be self evident. And there are no ads on the Resources page, where I provide links to a number of excellent free resources online. I was considering your site for inclusion on this, but again, I fail to find enough benefit in your problems to do so.

Besides the ads, I will reiterate that the main thing that differentiates Singapore word problems from any others is the model drawing approach. On your site, I see the problems aligned to specific years within the Singapore curriculum, but no model drawing is offered. So to me, it's really only offering a small part of what makes Singapore word problems great.

You asked for feedback, and you got it! Do with it what you will. I hope you realize I mean well.

I would love to see another resource out there people can really use. Unfortunately, there is a lot of hype about Singapore Math without a lot of deep understanding about how it works. If you develop your problems into something more useful, I will be happy to spread the word.

[Kris Murphy]

Dear Susan,

Thanks for the reply.

I faced a dilemma when I first created my math web pages. You have to please your visitors by having good quality content. At the same time, you have to please the search engines by having enough keywords so that the search engines know what your website is about.

If I don't place enough keywords in each web page, that page would have a very poor ranking by the search engines. That equals to zero visitors.

I thought for a long time about where I should place my keywords. Placing keywords in a math page is not as easy as placing keywords in a web page that is just an article. I took the approach you disliked for my first grade math worksheets.

I took a different approach for all the other grades. I placed them not into the actual math problems themselves but into the numbering. Here's an example.

Homeschooling Fun: 2nd Grade Math Worksheets
Math Question 5

A horde of centaurs and trolls attacked the small town of Knomville. Courageous Kelvin Knight was ordered by his king to kill all the monsters. Kelvin Knight single-handedly slew 639 of the monsters in battle. If he killed 271 more centaurs than trolls, how many centaurs did he kill?

Since the search engines were sending me quite a bit of visitors, about 600 to 800 unique visitors a day (and it is growing), I thought it was okay. And teachers from Singapore were linking to me too. So I left the keywords as they were.

I didn't face the keyword problem for my other topics - such as for parenting, phonics and homeschool laws.

Some examples:

Florida Homeschool Laws: http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/f ... chool.html

Parenting: http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/p ... -help.html

Phonics: http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/l ... onics.html

Disadvantages of homeschooling: http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/d ... oling.html

Anyway, I plan to offer printable PDF versions of my math pages stripped of all keywords to my visitors. They should be up in a few weeks time.

And remember everyone, you DON'T have to pay a single penny for anything that I have created for you. It is all FREE!

Thanks again, Susan, for highlighting this problem to me.

Best wishes,
Kris

[Kris Murphy]

Hi,

An update.

Thanks for your feedback. I take it very seriously indeed.

I have started creating printer-friendly PDF worksheets stripped of keywords so that you can use them in your classrooms.

The first worksheet is for my first grade math.

If you want to go to my PDF worksheet directly, here it is:
http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/s ... heet-1.pdf

The link to the PDF worksheet is on this page, right next to the link to worksheet 1:
http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/m ... grade.html

I have lots of PDF worksheets coming up. I hope to have created all the PDF worksheets by the end of 2 weeks' time.

As for your hope that I would create lessons on model drawing, I am working on that too. Either I would create them in my homeschool website or I would dedicate a totally new website to Singapore math.

A million thanks again for your genuinely constructive comments. It really, really helped!

Kris Murphy

[kanishkporwal]

See kris the problem with your site is that the questions also contain the key words
hence they are distracting
so i think you should find some new math problems and answers
you can check the link for some
http://math.tutorvista.com/math-problems.html

[TN Lizzie]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/te ... 10368.html

Kris, the problem with your website is that you do not have discernment. You are abusing the curiousity of homeschoolers who might click on your site, abusing Singapore Math's name in the process.

One representative problem, this for 3rd graders: http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/m ... ade-7.html
"Vincent Vampire has 2 rotting corpses under his bed. He intends to make meatballs with them. One dried-up body is 8 yr 6 mth old. The other, which is still teeming with wiggly maggots, is 3 yr 8 mth old. What is the total age of the 2 corpses?"



Examining your choice of word problems, I am deeply disturbed thinking about the education your twins are getting.

You often get what you pay for. As for your free worksheets, these are not worth that much.

[Theodore]

I'm sure this is an effective tactic for gaining search engine ranking, but it isn't the only way to do it. And the questions do seem rather violent. I'm moving the thread.

[susanrm]

Since I get a fair bit of traffic from this page, I'll announce it here. I created a course for parents to understand the math within and behind Singapore Math and similar curricula. I priced it low to make it accessible to whoever wants it. You can find it through my website front page, http://susanmidlarsky.com. Hope it helps some of you!

[insipseve]

i do not expect the online training to override all other education access. i mean for it to allow those who otherwise could not afford access to learn.

in the specific case of homeschool, there must be times for teaching math or english when it would save money and time to have a standard format.

in any case, since i have only 6 sigs and need 150 before the public can see it. and since i then need 25000 sigs before the feds look at it... i dont think any of us have to worry how it would come out.

thanks for your comment though, it gives me some idea how others view things.