Curriculum Review: Saxon 3 Math

by Selena Campbell

I used Saxon 3 Math with my two youngest children, Sara (age 7, 2^nd grade; and Iain, age 8, 3^rd grade). It was easy to teach them both, as Saxon is very repetitious.

If you don’t like to plan lessons, this is the math program for you. It is fully scripted, down to what to say to your children. Your only requirement as teacher is to read the lesson and get the required manipulatives and worksheets together for your kids (which you do need to do in advance).

After the first few lessons where the basics were introduced, each lesson started out by filling in a “meeting strip.” This includes the date, the “number of the day,” which is that day’s lesson number, and creating some equations using that number (e.g., Lesson 9 would have “9” as number of the day, and equations could be 4+5, 10-1, etc). There is a number pattern to complete (counting by 5’s or 7’s, etc). A “clock” fill-in-the-blank works with telling time, and there are coin cup blanks for counting coins in a cup—one of my kids’ favorite parts. The last thing is the “problem of the day,” a very age-appropriate/lesson-driven word problem.

In addition to the meeting strip, a monthly calendar is maintained in a meeting book, with daily temperatures recorded and comparisons made between daily temps, as well as other activities.

All of the above are done with each lesson, then a new concept is introduced, ranging from “Telling time to the Hour” (Lesson 1) to Graphing Points on a Coordinate Plane (Lesson 140). As you can see, much is covered in this program.

This program does use several manipulatives in addition to the workbooks:

o   pattern(geometric-shaped) blocks

o   counting chips/colored tiles

o   number charts

o   clocks

o   thermometer

o   rulers

o   yardstick

o   and other misc things.

Most items are available for purchase from sellers of the Saxon program (I purchased it from Rainbow Resource), but you could easily buy this curriculum and look through what is required before making a decision to buy the supplemental materials. If you are creative, you can use something else you already have (such as M&Ms for counting and sorting—yum!).

My children had fun with this math, and I enjoyed teaching it. The variety of activities kept it fun, and my kids had a ball checking the daily temperature (especially when our thermometer broke and they got to take turns calling the time & temperature number.)

My only complaint is the program is black and white (no colored pages at all), and the worksheets are printed on very thin paper, which makes it hard to tear them out (and easy to damage them when erasing).