Find ways to incorporate math into the things your student enjoys already–you know, the things that are outside the classroom and not at a desk or kitchen table. If they like horses and rodeos, do distance/rate/time equations (Algebra 1) at a barrel race. Consider attending a rodeo, and having classwork that day be to write down all of the barrel racing times, then come home and use that information to calculate how fast the horse was running in miles per hour.  When the math is connected to something the students are interested in already, then suddenly the math becomes interesting as well. Click Here for Some lesson plans and activity ideas to get you started.

For instance, if your kids are prone to asking the “why do I have to learn this?” question, you might choose to add in some activities with math instead of making every day a textbook day.

Some ideas for supplementing material might be to study area by measuring the area of each room in your house, then adding it together to get the area of your whole house. Students often have fun (and a lot of laughs) trying to measure around furniture, etc. If you’re brave, you can measure the attic too!

Some other ideas I’ve found is when students like to say “I will never use this after school”, instead of trying to argue with them, I offer a challenge:

“Ok,” I say, “If you are so sure you’re right about that, I challenge you to go through an entire day–from the moment you get up, until the moment you go to bed again–you cannot use any math. No numbers, no figures, no adding, subtracting, algebra, or geometry, or anything. No math at all.”

“no homework?!” they immediately ask. Which, I concede, “No, not even homework.”

So we try it. Then they are surprised to learn that they immediately can’t tell time, can’t cook anything, can’t drive, can’t read road signs, can’t buy anything at the store, can’t count their allowance, can’t pack a suitcase (because you have to know how many of each clothing item you might need–that’s math). They can’t even use the remote, because that’s channels–that’s math.

Math is everywhere in life, it is the fabric things are made of. Without math, the world could not function. But rather than try to talk your kids into this belief, it is easier to show them.

This kind of supplementation is called “real world activities” it gets your kids out of the desk and into the world around them. Math can be fun, and real for students, if you look for creative ways to do it.

We loved the fact that MIT was second to us in his list of options. Ha!

Anyway, he was emailing us because MIT’s Openware courses (which you can view here) were saying that they used the same textbook as we were using, so they contacted us about whether or not that is the book we would use.

If you’re interested as well, YES we would. The book we chose for Calculus 1 actually contains enough material to teach Calculus 1-3. Different schools break it up a little differently, so it depends on what school you’re dealing with as to what they consider the “division points” for each course, but we think it is pretty neat that MIT chose the same thing we did.

Their openware courses are actually a great option for parents if you’re interested in teaching Calculus 2 or 3 in high school. (and yes, some people do!)They don’t do video, but still it is MIT at home. We thought it was a cool option.

MIT seems to follow a course plan of

18.01

18.02

18.03

You can look at it here. Just extra material to support your effort!

What this means is that we have taken the textbook and we assign homework, assign certain weeks in which to complete that homework, as well as make up our own test, test grading guide, teachers guide, and several other materials that we provide for you to use.

In this way, AskDrCallahan is a curriculum (with our own method for teaching) as opposed to just a distributor.

If you have questions about our products, or need any clarification, you can reach us at support@askdrcallahan.com

We are putting together some customer comments and we would love to know what you thought about our homeschool DVD math courses.

To help things run smoothly, many parents turn to DVDs. But what are you really getting with a DVD education? Well, let’s take a brief look at teaching homeschool math with DVDs.

DVD instruction is essentially where a teacher is filmed teaching each lesson from a textbook. All of this information is recorded onto a DVD which parents can show to their students before their students study their lessons for that day.

A typical day with a DVD education system might look like this:

• Open DVD
• put DVD in player
• navigate to section being studied that day
• watch clip, following along in the textbook
• Read textbook section
• work practice problems
• work homework problems as assigned
• Review DVD as needed.

Click Here to view some sample video clips of DVD lessons by AskDrCallahan

Parents/Students who might want to use a DVD course include (but certainly isn’t limited to) those who:

• haven’t studied math in a while and need some help remembering the concepts
• independent/ teach themselves
• want a classroom experience, but who want to customize the pace for what makes sense for them
• enjoy/require visual preparation and review resource
• things just make more sense when you can watch someone else work the problems on a board before attempting them yourself

There are many reasons and benefits to getting a DVD course. You can probably think of others that I didn’t list above. If you have a DVD course, why did you decide to go that route? Would you recommend DVD courses to other homeschooling families? Why?Why not?

Click on the Photo to be taken to

that math course’s video samples.

We’ve even divided them up here by course name, so you can go directly to the course samples you’re after.

Algebra	Geometry
Algebra 2 With Trigonometry	Calculus

Math is a very real science and the truths you learn in math are the same for everyone. So no matter what publishing company puts them on paper, you should still be learning math.

There is nothing more significant about a good geometry course from company A and a good geometry course from company B as long as both companies A and B cover geometry well. There might be some differences as far as how each company covers the material; one company might provide more example problems than another. One company may have more real life examples than the second company. Or perhaps you like the number of available homework problems in one book over another. Those differences might make your choose Company A over Company B, but there should not be a requirement to take courses from the same publishing company in order to get a good education.

A teachers guide, however, provides aid to the teacher (parent) administering the course. The Teacher’s Guide contains tests, test grading guides, sample worksheets, pacing information and a general course overview. The Teacher’s Guide does NOT contain answers to homework problems

But how do you tell the difference between eighteen math courses all labeled “Algebra”. Are they all the same course? The answer is that some courses are the same, but many are not.

To evaluate a course’s key concepts, check the Table of Contents. The Table of Contents is the best place to start because it gives you a good overview of what is being covered in that course.  This is the place where you can decide quickly and definitively if a math course is covering all of the concepts a good math course needs. If you scan the table of contents and a key concept is missing, you know immediately that you don’t need that course.

(For more information on identifying the key concepts per course, click here)