Singapore Math

During the 2010-2011 school year the teachers at The Capitol School had an inservice day where we had an intro course to Singapore math.  For those of you that aren't educators or have never heard of Singapore math let me give you a brief overview......

Singapore is from...you guessed it Singapore.  According to the Singapore math website (which you can visit here) back in the late 1990s a group of researchers began studying how students from different countries performed on standardized tests.  It was noticed that over several years students from Singapore consistently scored higher in mathematics than other countries throughout the world.  So obviously they were doing something right and these individuals wanted to bring this type of math education to the United States.  The Singapore math program is a variety of workbooks, textbooks and manipulatives that have been taken from Singapore and developed for students in the United States.

picture taken from Singapore math website

So after all of us teachers spent an entire day of learning about this "new" way to teach math, we decided that this was a program we felt would benefit our students greatly.  One thing I love about our school is that we are able to adapt what we do to best meet the needs of our students.....so if something doesn't work....we change it!  So in our class we use Singapore math, but we also use a lot of Montessori materials, as well as games/activities for different math topics (money, time, measurement etc.).  Singapore math is very visual...which is wonderful because it helps explain your basic math concepts in a way that students really get it.  In 2010 the New York Times wrote a really great article about some schools in New York using Singapore math....the article gives a great overview of the program as well as some pros and cons of using it....to read this article simply click here.

This is what our workbooks look like. Since we use many different ways to teach math we use the 1A book for students that are in our class for the first time (generally students that are 5 and will turn 6 within the school year) and the 1B book for students that are in our class for the second time (generally students that are 6 and will turn 7 within the school year).

This is an example of what one of the workbook pages look like.......they often have a math problem written as a word problem with lots of visuals & manipulatives to help the student determine the answer.

So right now we use Singapore math.....if it doesn't work in the future we will change, but right now I am really enjoying using this and I believe it is very helpful for my students.  I will try to take some pictures of the kids using Singapore math and upload them on another post!