Math update - hope I'm doing the right thing

From Deb:

Yesterday brought another tantrum about Saxon Math. As Ella pointed out (her sense of time is growing much better...she has a much more accurate sense about when various things have happened), that made three days in a row of Madison fussing over math.

In Laura's comment from yesterday's entry, she pointed out how daunting it can be for a child to be placed in front of this big math book and be told to learn independently from it. She only does half a lesson per day with Raymond.

We may get to half a lesson per day when we are actually learning new stuff, but this is all review, review, review.

So yesterday Madison had done about 1/2 the 29 math problems (have I mentioned they are REVIEW?!?) in about 90 minutes. Whining the whole way, fidgeting, staring off into space, etc. Then a tantrum.

I realized she was just creating all this angst for herself, erecting her own barriers to the whole thing. I wanted to prove to her that it didn't have to be this way. So a little later, I brought her over to me, took her answer page from her, and sat her down next to me.

"Number 13. What is the answer?"

She focused for a moment, and gave the correct answer. I wrote it down.

"Number 14. What is the answer?"

Again, no problem.

We did 13-29 in this fashion, taking less than 10 minutes. She was rather amazed.

Today, I sat her down next to me for the 29 problems in Lesson 4. I made out the answer sheet while she read the lesson.

"Number 1. What is the answer?"

Just like yesterday. We had the whole thing done in under 20 minutes.
I wonder, really, if the problem is more the fact that felt so much on her own for this, or the fact that she has to *write* the stuff on her own.

So tomorrow, I'll test which of these might be true. The strategy is the following (she knows this): For half of them, we'll do it just like today. The second half, she will write the answer herself, but I'll still be next to her, guiding the process. We'll see whether her having to physically write the answers herself makes a difference.

See, I had envisioned that we'd start at the beginning of Saxon Math, and that more of the lesson would be about the discipline of Madison starting to work on her own than about the math itself, which she already knows how to do. We saw how THAT worked out. Maybe she is just not ready for the independent work. Maybe I should do Math-U-See instead. But I'm really cheap about it, I guess. I figure that I should be able to teach my brainy little math kids math without spending money on a program that has them watching a video of someone *else* teaching them math.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have been such a softie about switching the program when she had a tantrum or three. Maybe that will teach her to throw tantrums, although over the last six months or so that has decreased enormously.

I think I was right, though. I think it was just too abrupt, plunking her down in front of the book on Monday morning.

Chalk this one up to an experiment.

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If indeed it's the handwriting that's getting her way, I'll have to (ugh) work more with Madison on handwriting. This morning, though, she did it herself. Even before we started school, she spontaneously decided to write a list of the Christmas carols that she knew, down on a piece of paper. Then she asked me if I had a list of carols so that she could pick out which ones she knew, and I pulled one up on the web. She took 15 minutes or so to write them out, and then we were treated to a little concert. She was thrilled when I told her it could count as handwriting for school.