First, I want to thank my blogging friends who haven't given up on me since I haven't been blogging much lately! I will start getting around to visiting your blogs and catching up soon, and I hope to post more about what's going on around here besides puppy, puppy, puppy.

This week's theme on the Homeschool Memoirs meme is "Something New" - sharing about something new we're using this year. I must tell you all about a fantastic new math curriculum I found this year. I hadn't planned to change math; I was happy with what we were using. But as I walked through the vendor hall at my state homeschool conference last summer, one of the vendors stopped me, saying, "Would you like some information about a new math curriculum? The Old Schoolhouse says it's their new favorite." Well, that piqued my interest, so I started looking into it.

Math on the Level takes a different approach to teaching math than anything I've seen or used before. It uses neither a "spiral" or a "mastery" approach but what I see as a flexible approach. It gives the teacher a complete math scope and sequence from preschool through pre-algebra, and I decide what to teach my children and when to teach it. In our old math curriculum, I had to kind of hold my son back and not teach him multiplication because he hadn't fully mastered multiple-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping. Now I can have him continue to review and work on those concepts while we also move on and start learning multiplication facts. We'll probably get started on fractions soon, too, even before we work on division. Why not? MotL is a flexible curriculum that allows the teacher/parent to decide what the child is ready to learn, and I'm all about flexiblity.

The flexibility can be overwhelming to someone who's used to being told what to teach and in what order to teach it. Realizing that, the author, Carlita Boyles - and her husband John - offer as much help as needed. They have also started a Yahoo! group (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mathonthelevel/) where new (and experienced) users can ask questions and get help using it.

Finally, the thing that my kids like best about math this year is that they only have to do 5 problems a day. Seriously. And, yes, that's enough. Each problem is to review a different concept. For example, my son's math "5-a-day" today included:

• multiplication by 2 (3x2=__)
• skip count by 10
• use a clock to show 5:15
• multiple-digit subtraction without regrouping using a $ sign
• place value (breaking the number 6,492 into thousands, hundreds, tens and units)

Concepts that are mastered (or mostly mastered) are reviewed less frequently (once a week or two weeks), while those that the child is still working on are reviewed daily or every other day. The hardest (if I can even call it hard) part of using this curriculum is that I need to prep their 5-a-day worksheets, but since most of my curriculum is no prep, then I don't mind spending a little time on this.

Can you tell I really love this curriculum?!