Saxon Algebra 1 Student Text (3rd Edition)

My mom had used the Saxon Middle Grades texts with great success from grades 5-7 (6/5 through 8/7) I loved the incremental approach the directions were clear all the drill and review helped me do better I liked the Investigations every ten lessons; they really "showed" me what I was learning It was a completely different story with Algebra I however The way they explained the concepts were so different from the lower grades The formality of the language was difficult for me to understand and I had to reread many lessons over and over again just to "get" it Because I didn't understand some of the concepts that they explained I barely made a "C" on my first test Finally a good friend of mine lent me her DIVE CD and this helped a great deal Even with the CD however I ceased to understand anything after lesson 76 and I continued to make low grades on the tests (which isn't too hard to do there are only 20 questions) I used my own money to purchase Teaching Textbooks for Algebra I and that went much better I find their review method frustrating however so we may be moving back to Saxon using the Saxon Teacher CDs Saxon's program is very thorough and rigorous it's just not for some children If you DO use it I'd recommend using one of the many media supplements to explain the lessons (such as the Teaching Tapes Saxon Teacher DIVE etc) A typical lesson may go something like this: Say you were on lesson 17 for example The topics in this lesson are Factors and Coefficients Terms and The Distributive Property First your student would read the explanations of the three new concepts While doing this it is best to take notes from the text in a notebook and work the example problems otherwise your student may have no idea what's going on Next she would work practice problems A-F in the practice set It is best to check these problems in the solutions manual immediately after working them so that any misunderstandings and errors may be corrected before moving on It will take some time but it is worth it Then she would work problems 1-30 in the problem set Typically problems 1-9 are a type of word problem; problems 10-26 are computational; and problems 27-30 deal with finding the area perimeter surface area volume etc of various figures It is also a good idea to check these immediately after working all the equations In total reading the lesson along with taking the notes and working example problems will take between 20-40 minutes depending on the lesson and the difficulty of the topics Working the practice set should take anywhere from 15-25 minutes again highly dependent on the lesson and complexity of the topics The problem set will take the longest This can take anywhere from 35-65 minutes; so completing a lesson could take as little as an hour and 10 minutes or as much as 2 hours and 10 minutes Overall this is a fairly rigorous program so if your student is not strong in math the constant review will probably help them retain the information well If your student is a math whiz they will most likely find the program tedious and repetitive Saxon teaches the "hows" but it doesn't teach you the "whys" like the Harold Jacobs Algebra text