Reply to Kumon - yes or no

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Kumon - yes or no"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Kumon is good at giving kids repetition and practice, which there isn't enough of in school.  I think this can be very valuable for math that is mechanical (e.g., basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and thus can provide a reasonable starting foundation.  That type of repetition can also help to build some amount of intuition and feel for numbers.

That being said, I don't think Kumon is great about developing a understanding of concepts or strong problem solving.  It's more reinforcement and support for that which you may have already learned at a high level and then getting a better feel through practice.

Nowadays, there are more options than Kumon (e.g., AOPS, Russian School of Math, Mathnasium), so you should consider those as well.  Those other options have their own strengths and weaknesses.  For my kids, we opted for AOPS after considering all of these options and we sometimes supplement with workbooks and flash cards to get more repetition (which is valuable at younger ages).  I am biased though because I did Kumon as a kid and hated it.  In retrospect, it had some value -- I'm still quite quick at basic mechanical math.  I am no math genius though and I struggled with higher level math in college partly because I didn't always understand the underlying concepts.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics