As summer is now in full swing, I can announce our family’s plan to return to homeschooling. We will do some work over the summer, but our full schedule will kick off in the fall.

Later this summer I will post our full curriculum list, but over the next few weeks as I pull our material together I want to share some subject-specific resources I am working on. While my high schooler will be doing her math through an online program, I will still be teaching my younger children math at home.

I have experience with both Saxon Math and Singapore Math, and honestly struggled to decide which one I wanted to go back to, since it’s been almost two years since we last homeschooled.

Saxon Math uses a spiral approach, which means it combines incremental skill development with continued practice, meaning concepts are taught and then reviewed frequently. I was happy with the Saxon approach and think it is a great program, but the biggest complaint my oldest child had (she did Saxon 5/4 years ago) was the sheer amount of problems she was always expected to do. For my oldest, we ultimately switched over to Singapore Math, which is a mastery approach and focuses less on large amounts of practice problems and more on critical thinking and understanding concepts.

For my younger son, who is on the autism spectrum and spent most of this past school year unhappy with the amount of math homework he had to get through each week, I believe the Singapore approach, with more effort on learning concepts and seeing how to apply them to whole problems, with hands-on manipulatives and visuals playing a more prominent role, will be the better approach for us. For a detailed comparison of Saxon versus Singapore to see if one would be a good fit for your family, you can check out some helpful reviews that compare the two curriculum choices here, here and here.

*Note – while Saxon sells their curriculum as a full year (for example Saxon 5/4 is designed for a full year for on-level fourth graders or fifth graders that might be struggling with math), each Singapore curriculum is divided into two units (A and B) that comprise a full year of math.

I will be teaching fourth, fifth and seventh grade math this year. When we have used Singapore in the past, I knew the Primary Mathematics line was K-6, so I won’t lie – my brain started to short circuit a bit thinking I would need to use one program for my younger two, and the other program for my seventh grader. Thankfully I found that Singapore DOES in fact have a middle grades curriculum, Dimensions, that is designed for grades 6-8.

So, for the upcoming school year we will be using the following:

Fourth Grade

Singapore Primary Mathematics 4A/4B (US Edition)

Fifth Grade

Singapore Primary Mathematics 5A/5B (US Edition)

Seventh Grade

Singapore Dimensions 7A/7B

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I’ve been working on putting materials together for use with my students.

Manipulatives and math tools that I am using and always recommend, regardless of curriculum used, include:

Math Linking Cubes

Transparent Color Discs (for covering numbers on Hundred Chart etc.)

Geometric Solids

Basic Geometry set (with protractor, compass and set squares)

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In addition, some printed resources are available for users to photocopy in the Appendix of the Singapore Home/Teacher Guides. I have been printing and laminating some of these resources, including fraction circles and fraction bars, for use with my fourth- and fifth- graders.

I have also created several resources for our use that are available on the Math Printables page and include Fact Family practice sheets, Multiplication tables, Hundred Charts, Number cards, Number discs, Place Value Charts, and Prime Numbers worksheets. I will continue to add resources to my Printable pages so please check back to see what new resources have been added.

If you would like to use and of these resources, please feel free to download. If you decide to share, please link back to my page for others to download, rather than sharing the pdf files themselves. Thank you!