I have probably mentioned our math struggles before. We have all levels of math ability in our family, from seriously challenged to confident and competent, and in between. Don’t forget to throw some math anxiety into the mix! (We even have one who is a curious combination of competence and anxiety.) Thus, I can tell you that we have tried an awful lot of math programs over the years.

Math on the Level is a different approach from what you’ll find in the textbooks and workbooks sitting there, all shiny and pretty, on the tables and shelves at your local curriculum fair or homeschool store. Let me start, for those new to homeschooling, by describing the most commonly found approach.

The standard textbook methodology seems to be a spiral approach, teaching the same things year after year, only a little more in depth each year. The book explains how to do something, gives some sample problems, and then provides a multitude of practice problems. Depending on the program, there will be a certain amount of review built in, such as a review lesson every few lessons, or a section of every lesson given over to reviewing what has gone before.

If you use a textbook geared toward use in institutional schools, you’ll run into an interesting problem. The first third of the text for any particular grade is review of the previous year’s work. This is to make up for the math skills lost over a summer vacation. Also, I was told by a math teacher that math textbooks usually contain more lessons than can be covered in an academic year, for greater flexibility. (Classes full of gifted students who live and breathe mathematics can whiz through and not run out of material, I suppose.) This teacher told me that homeschooled students who don’t take huge chunks of time off for vacation can probably get away with using just the middle third of the textbook!

Another problem with the textbooks, as I found to my frustration, was that some of these explain only one way to solve a problem. If you have a student who struggles as much in math as one of my students does, and you have troubles with math yourself (raising a sheepish hand, here), you might not be able to think of an alternative way to explain how to work out a math problem to help your student who doesn’t grasp the way it’s laid out in the particular text you’re using.

So, what is Math on the Level, if not a series of textbooks?

The program is designed to take your family from pre-Kindergarten through pre-Algebra. That means that when a student has mastered all the concepts, he or she is ready to tackle Algebra. You can whiz through the program, or you can move slowly and carefully, but the important point is that you move at the right pace for the student, presenting new material when the student is ready to grasp it. The program is simple enough that this is possible, even when you are teaching a houseful of children all at different levels. (As we have been trying to follow the educational precepts of Charlotte Mason for the past nine years, let me add this, for other Charlotte Mason-style educators: The way the program is used fits well with Charlotte Mason’s concept of short lessons, and the practical, relevant approach fits Miss Mason’s educational philosophy very well.)

A typical day starts with five review questions. Each question tests a different area of math knowledge already mastered. (That’s why it’s review.) In one of those five problems, your student might compare the sum of two numbers to the product of two other numbers, testing comprehension and ability to add, multiply, and apply the concept of greater than/less than/equal to. Another problem might involve geometry; and yet another, fractions and decimals. There’s an amazing amount of review that can be done with just five problems!

After the review, you do a math lesson together, following the lessons and suggestions in one of the four books that guide you through the areas of Operations (all the different ways of representing and manipulating numbers), Geometry and Measurements, Money and Decimals, and Fractions. There are two more guide books, Math Adventures and Math Resources, which we’ll address shortly. You’ll explain a concept and work through practice problems together. Early lessons, explanations, and concepts involve manipulatives (coins, pizza, cookies, candy pieces, blocks, paper pieces, number lines) and only when there is a solid understanding of the underpinnings does the student’s work delve further into the abstract. The abundant colorful illustrations found in the books are very helpful, and the explanations are both conversational in tone and comprehensive. Practical activities abound, as do margin notes and reminders. An older student using Math on the Level could easily read through the lessons working independently. Going through a lesson, I have the feeling that the author is teaching me, in order that I may teach my children. The frustration that used to characterize our math lessons has vanished.

Once your child has demonstrated mastery of a concept, it is added to the list of review problems. Review is systematic, and reproducible charts for keeping track of concept mastery and frequency of review are included with the program. The latter part of every teaching volume is taken up with pages of sample review problems complete with answers, all keyed to the Concept Chart. There is a logical progression – you don’t need to review single-digit addition once it is replaced with multiple-digit addition, for example. This practical approach means that your student can keep up a large portfolio of math skills with reviews that range from daily frequency for freshly learned material, to once every three weeks for something where the student has solid and confident understanding. By correcting the review problems with the student, you can discern a careless mistake from an error stemming from incomplete understanding, and adjust your teaching and review schedule accordingly.

I admit, it looked a little overwhelming to me at first glance, but after reading the Overview and Record Keeping book, the guide to using Math on the Level, I was able to implement the program right away, and see immediate success and growing confidence in my students. The program includes a Concept Chart that outlines the logical progression of concepts to be mastered, complete with references to page numbers in the teaching volumes where each concept is taught and sample review problems are found. The record-keeping forms make it easy to schedule and keep track of reviews. The author has many practical suggestions for implementing the program, from the beginning student through the high schooler needing remediation.

So how does math look at your house, if you’re using Math on the Level? The author suggests a week made up of daily 5-A-Day reviews followed by a teaching time, with two or three days devoted to lessons and two or three days for Math Adventures. What are Math Adventures, you might ask? This is a volume of suggestions and activities where you use math in everyday, practical ways such as cooking, using money, combating boredom during travel time, playing games, learning math vocabulary, and using math in unit studies. I’m sure you can imagine lots of ways to use math in cooking (fractions, measurements, multiplication and division, just to name a few), but how about the other areas? Well, how about playing “store” – a game our girls have loved, or learning how to set up a budget, or creating a simple business like a lemonade stand or garage sale? How about doing math in the car? There are oodles of suggestions, travel-related activities, and simple games to choose from. There’s an entire chapter on games, as a matter of fact, with guidelines for using games in education, a way to involve toddlers (or at least prevent toddlers from destroying a game in progress), suggestions on using store-bought games and making your own, both sit-down games and lively, physically active games. Another section deals with teaching math vocabulary, including common conversions. Finally, Math Adventures contains a section with suggestions for incorporating math into unit studies. You may have noticed that most unit studies don’t include a lot of math – but with Math on the Level math can be an integral part of your units!

The Math Resources guide includes helpful material on reading and using graphs and charts; explaining set theory; teaching, solving, and writing word problems; and tips for memorizing in general and memorizing math facts in particular. In addition, you’ll find a comprehensive dictionary of math terminology.

I wish we’d had Math on the Level from the start. This program emphasizes an important concept, one I ran afoul of for years that contributed mightily to our difficulties. That concept is maturation. There are milestones in child development, as you’re probably aware. Children reach these milestones at different ages; we’re not talking cookie cutters! Perhaps you’ve tried this with a young child: Take a tall, thin container that holds eight ounces. Fill it with water. Have a short, fat container standing nearby, that also holds eight ounces. Ask a small child which container holds more, or do they hold the same amount? It amazes me how a child will cling to the belief that one container holds more than another, even after you’ve demonstrated that they hold the same amount! It’s a step in the maturation process – a concept that the child is not yet ready to understand.

Math on the Level is laid out with care and a great deal of forethought. The author, with her background in the areas of child development, learning disabilities, and special education, and more that twenty years of teaching experience (both institutional and homeschooling), has given careful consideration to a logical order of presenting math concepts, as well as teaching children what they are ready to learn.

This is not a workbook or textbook approach, though hundreds of math problems are provided within the program for your convenience. This is not the type of program where you present a lesson and then sit your child down with a sheet of problems that will take up the next half hour or hour. As a matter of fact, Math on the Level is an intensely practical program! Since we’ve begun using these materials, I don’t hear the sighs I used to hear, the muttered complaints, the questions about why we’re learning this, and what relevance does it have? When would we ever use this in real life? (Okay, you may think I’m dealing with a character issue, but there’s a grain of truth there. It’s hard to motivate a student who can’t see any relevance in what is being learned.)

I was a little dubious about the adequacy of five review problems a day, and yet I find that it works for two reasons. I can make up the day’s math for three students fairly quickly; I can even make up a whole week’s worth of review pages in one sitting, if pressed for time. Having only five problems means that my students concentrate on their work; they’re motivated to get through quickly and move on to the lesson time, which is more fun than math lessons used to be, and they know if they do well they won’t have to do the same sorts of problems repeatedly, to the point of tedium. (Getting to the review-every-three-weeks status for a concept is cause for celebration, as far as they’re concerned, and something they eagerly look forward to.)

Math on the Level is available as a set, or you can purchase individual volumes. I’d encourage you to consider buying the entire set, not only for the savings in cost, but because of the flexibility and usefulness of the complete program. There are also two volumes available for separate purchase (see related review) with math drills for helping to learn the addition/subtraction facts and the multiplication/division facts.

At first glance the program seems costly, but when I compared the cost of math curriculum for each of our three girls to this whole-family program, which is complete in itself, spanning all the years from preschool to pre-Algebra (depending on the student, about eight years, give or take a few years), I found Math on the Level to be quite a good value. The cost of Math on the Level works out to less than what we’ve been paying, the past few years, for two years’ worth of material for three students. The books are non-consumable and sturdy, with attention to quality of materials and printing, and the record-keeping forms are reproducible for use within your own family. Add to that the special introductory pricing for 2007, and you have a real bargain on your hands. A good bargain, by the way, one that will be paying for itself over and over, providing a solid grounding in math for your students – and even for you.