First, let me issue a disclaimer: I was not approached by The Good and the Beautiful in any way, we purchased the Good and the Beautiful Math 1 curriculum on pdf. This is my honest review so far after using it for almost 3 months.
We had reached about day 100 or so in Easy Peasy All In One Homeschool, and we were finding it a real slog to get through our day. Between learning their new system, flash being phased out, and just needing a change, we decided to use another curriculum.
We were already using The Good and the Beautiful for language arts, so I though I’d try the Good and the Beautiful Math 1 too.
He flew through the first few lessons with ease. He covered six months work in only two and a half months. But something was sort of bothering me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I realized what it was! Before I get into that, I want to give a review on Math 1 part 1.
First of all, it really is a gorgeous curriculum, at least visually. The pages are colorful but not distracting. The manipulatives in the pdf are gorgeous. I printed out all the various cards and manipulative pieces onto card stock, laminated them, and cut them out. For the game boards I just used normal printer paper and put them in page protectors. This took me about half a day to get everything ready. The only thing I’ve had to add was a couple of 10 sided dice.
So the first few days went well, Peanut was enthusiastic and enjoyed the lessons. He loved most of the games, but wasn’t a fan of the tangram symmetry puzzles. He didn’t like the small pieces, so I took out our old plastic tangram pieces and he liked that better, but was upset since the colors and sizes are different.
By the end of the second week I had already filled in a couple of gaps I didn’t even realize he had. He learned about the “not equal” sign, and the concept of “counting on”. Things were going great!
I had noticed that Peanut didn’t care for the stories though. It sometimes took 2 to 3 pages of “flowery” storyline to teach a simple concept. He’d fidget, and before I could finish 2 paragraphs his attention span was done. I learned quickly to sum up the ‘concept’ of the story and condense it into a couple of sentences. 15 minutes of reading and hands on work now became 5 minutes! Yay!
After a month in, we had covered about two and a half months of work. This is when we finally began to see some issues with this curriculum. Although it’s very thorough and it moves at a slow and steady pace, something was bothering me. I just couldn’t figure out what.
So we kept going, eventually slowing down and doing only two lessons a day. We rarely did the daily dose anymore because Peanut already knows about place value, patterns, and what number comes before and after another. Right now we haven’t touched the planner for about 2 weeks. I’m going to start using it again, but not as intended. We’ll do our own thing like looking up weird holidays etc and write them in the calendar instead.
Still, the daily lessons were going well, but I noticed that between Math and Language Arts, Peanut would become extremely ADHD. I’d open the math book and right away he’d begin to fidget. I couldn’t get more than 2 or 3 sentences into the lesson before he was finding reasons to leave (bathroom break, need a snack, gotta let the dog out, etc) and what should only take us 15 minutes now took over half an hour. And that’s before getting to the independent work page.
I knew I couldn’t condense Language arts, it has too much that has to be explained. So I decided to go over the math lessons the night before and sort of condense all the stories into a lesson that would take no more than 4 or 5 minutes to teach, but make them extremely hands on. Then I’d let him do the independent work and a game. This is when I realized the truth. This curriculum has very little ‘practice’. Most of the lesson is telling a story.
At most, the daily student worksheet has a maximum of approximately 12 practice problems. In a nutshell, 25 to 30 minutes of one full math lesson, done as intended, is about 10 to 15 minutes of story telling, 10 minutes of game play, 5 minutes of actual teaching, and about 2 minutes of actual student practice.
Now I’m not saying I want Peanut to be stuck at a desk doing 15 minutes worth of math problems, but I would love to see a bit more ‘work’ for him to reinforce the concepts and review them, and a bit less ‘story’. We finished Math part 1, and now I’m debating on continuing with part 2 or going with something different.
Also, unlike the Good and the Beautiful Language Arts, Math 1 has no assessments. I was missing the “wow, you’re really improving” factor that LA has. I’d love to see something similar so we can see his improvement over the use of the curriculum. The assessments were a major factor in my choosing LA, so I am honestly disappointed that there isn’t any in Math.
To be fair, Peanut has learned some new things with this math. He is getting the concept of doubles memorized, and knows most of the doubles to 10 except 7+7 and 8+8. He also knows that when adding to 9, 9 wants to be 10 so it sucks one number up (9+5 becomes 10+4). I would have never thought to teach him this trick on my own!
Overall this curriculum just feels like it needs more actual work and less storytelling, at least for an autistic child that has adhd. The stories are too ‘girly’ for him – he finds the beautiful, flowery language too much. He’s a kid that loves Star Wars light saber battles, not collecting pretty seashells and shiny marbles.
The only other issue is that we are not from the USA. Our money and measurements are different. We use Metric, not imperial. Our coins and bills are different. We don’t use pennies. Not a deal breaker, but a real pain to work around sometimes.
I’ve decided to keep using this curriculum, mainly because we paid for it, and it’s definitely not cheap, even as a pdf!
I like how the Good and the Beautiful Math uses the spiral method, so Peanut doesn’t get bored. I need to keep editing it to shorter lessons without the long stories, cutting it down to bare bones for the actual teaching. The games are good for reinforcement and Peanut enjoys them.
Where this curriculum fails is the student work pages just aren’t enough actual practice in my opinion, and I really want some kind of periodical assessments, maybe every 3 weeks or so to see the improvements. Yes, there is a final assessment, but I worry that if he doesn’t pass it, it may have been noticed during more frequent assessments and we could spend a few days on it rather than waiting to the end of the year.
The Good and the Beautiful Math 1 will remain as our “spine” for math, but I am now supplementing it with a couple of worksheets daily that Peanut can do independently. I’ll make another post on what they are another time! This brings our math day from 10 minutes up to about 20 now, it feels more reasonable and Peanut gets much more practice without being overwhelmed.
A Joyful Chaos 