From: Colleen Juntunen
My oldest learned to count up to 25 at age three by using pennies. He had the incentive of receiving as many as he could count up to correctly. My second son, when 4, used old dead batteries to play a little plus or minus game. My daughter just turned five uses buttons, [...]

A few months ago, you posted on your blog about my sister’s website Homeschool Writers. I wondered if you would like to post a link to my new website Homeschool Math Contests on your blog. Here’s a description of the site. [...]

Dear Laurie,
We have started math again with Hannah. I have taught her Singapore Math since she was 6, and I have the books 5B and 6A and 6B so I thought that we should continue in the same track. My concern with that decision is two-fold. First, I am not aware how the programme transitions [...]

Hi Laurie,
I was wondering if you have ever considered not having your girls do all the math up through Saxon Advanced Math? Mine CAN do it but there are so many other things they want to be learning and that I want them to learn, it seems sort of silly to take the time [...]

Dear Laurie,
… I wanted to give a testimonial about your book Teaching the Trivium. Last year my husband and I became very convicted about having our children in school. It was a wonderful Christian school, and I was the 3rd/4th grade language arts teacher. He told me in early January that he [...]

The following is a summary of our article Research on the Teaching of Math: Formal Arithmetic at Age Ten, Hurried or Delayed? by Harvey Bluedorn
Historically, the age for instruction in arithmetic and mathematics seems to have slowly shifted from age fifteen or later down to age ten. Then, about a century ago, this was shifted [...]

The Historical Perspective
Strange though it may seem at first, it is nevertheless quite clear that addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – comparatively simple operations, which we inflict on our children while they are still quite young – were, in antiquity, far beyond the horizon of any primary school. The widespread use of calculating-tables and counting-machines [...]

I’m doing my catalog run-throughs, have read Teaching the Trivium again, and am comparison shopping everything on my 28-item list for the coming year. I’ve got 3 boys, 9yo, 7yo and almost 2yo. We did 2 years of Saxon math, but have been much happier with Singapore this last year for both big boys, [...]

Our now 14 ds had a horrible time trying to learn to read and do math simultaneously. I read about delaying math, and promptly threw out his math book. Well, shelved it anyway. Within a month, his reading level soared 2 grade levels. It seems the stress of learning both [...]

I am trying to figure out how your recommendation about delaying formal math until age ten would work out in practice. Specifically, when does the child learn basic math facts? It seems to me that you can’t do much math without knowing the math facts. If you wait until age ten to start learning the [...]