to those who went to my Math is Beautiful class. Between the technical difficulties and the shortness of the time, I hope that my main message got across. Let me restate it here: Math educators agree that early mathematics shouldn't be just arithmetic, and not just pencil and paper, but in schools they have a hard time implementing anything else. But in your homeschool you don't have to teach math the way you were taught. Many math programs I’ve seen spend too long teaching too little, especially in the primary grades. There is a "more excellent way" and that is to infuse it with interesting non-traditional math and logic topics.
We call this doing “Fun Math” at our house. My eleven-year old does Saxon math every other day, reading through two lessons, doing one problem set, and checking it himself, which takes him less than 30 minutes. On the other days we explore the world of math together. In other words, he's getting the traditional and the non-traditional math, in the same amount of time.
The handout on the LDSEHE web site lists many resources that we have loved, and the three extra things that I threw in were The Elegant Universe, a PBS documentary about String Theory, and tenthdimension.com, which has an animation that shows how we could have up to ten dimensions (my son also got excited by the book Flatland that we read together on this topic.) The other web site which contains lots of pages of recreational math ideas is mathworld.wolfram.com.
In the next couple of days I'll post my full text of my presentation, along with many other articles I've written on homeschooling. I did have them up here, but they were deleted off the server and I hadn't put them back in yet, but I will.
Good Luck!
