Conventional Arithmetic - Learning Numbers With Spunky the Donkey Grade 1 Book 1

These books are great for my 1st graders! It's a bit heavy on the practice so, once they know their problems and can do it quickly, I let them skip every other row of problems. They seem to have mastered the problems really well!

Yes I would recommend this product. My daughter has Down syndrome and she was able to do most of it. There is a lot of repetition. I did not use the teachers book much but it does have extra helps and direction in using the lesson.

I like it, easy for my first grade son.

I first started my 2 sons out in Rod and Staff's (current edition) grade 1 Math, but they struggled in it, especially the lack of review of addition while doing subtracting in the books. Once they start learning the subtraction families in lesson 56 they do NOT do addition (other than in only 2 small places in bk 1, where they do 3-number column addition) until they cycle back to learning the rest of the addition families in book 2 in lesson 102! It ended up with them being in tears and confused because "I don't remember how to do this".

When I realized that my one son was almost to the end of the 2nd R&S book and had not retained. I switched them to CLE which did help as a remedial review for all he had learned. Ho retained well and started doing great, but I personally was not pleased with CLE as anything more than review, and I did not want to take them into new ground in the CLE books with how bits and pieces, no big picture, no mastery, spiral they are. My sons needed mastery AND review.

So I started looking at the Schoolaid Math. It has been a HUGE blessing to find that they teach both mastery and review, not bits and pieces spiral like CLE but it is still pleasant variety of work. It is also teaching more of an old fashioned arithmetic than R&S. They teach adding by endings, and do not teach crutches with column addition like R&S does. I am SUPER pleased with it.

I started the grade 2 and liked it so well that I started my 5 year old daughter with grade 1. Starting in grade 1 book 1, they teach additive subtraction where you find the missing addend in addition and that really helps in the understanding of subtraction, and that was something neither editions of Rod and Staff gr 1 had.

Spunky has a consistent reference of the hay bales/Spunky's wagon which is great for understanding meanings of numbers and addition/subtraction. The old edition R&S gr 1 with the ducks and the pond also gave that same understanding but the new edition did away with that aspect.

I like the Spunky books so well, even though when I first started homeschooling I didn't even really consider this curriculum because I ascetically liked the look of R&S better (R&S has such sweet pictures inside and is all done by a computer, whereas Spunky Math has hand-drawn artwork, hand-drawn dots for tracing out work at spots, etc, but now I view it that Schoolaid is definitely superior as far as the arithmetic teaching. I definitely do not plan on using anything else in the future for grade 1&2 arithmetic.

Just as a note in case others would have an interest in knowing: I do plan on putting the boys straight into StudyTime Arithmetic after they finish grade 2 Spunky. I have already purchased grade 3 StudyTime and think that Spunky grade 1&2 give a wonderful foundation for grade 3 StudyTime.