A Friendly Warning
You may take a look at our lesson plans and decide to accelerate them, doing more than 1 lesson per week because they look simple to you, but try to resist the urge. These lesson plans have evolved over a period of 11 years and are geared to insuring even average student success. They have been time tested. The first few lessons are (by design) not very difficult. This is to get students to 'buy in' and into the practice of doing the homework. Remember, we are not trying to set speed records or win trophies;
we are trying to instill in the student a life-long interest in math.

We have seen spectacular failures by over-eager parents trying to cram this information into their children in abbreviated periods of time! (Starting the program after Christmas? No problem! We'll just do 2 lessons a week!) Bad idea!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the worst failures have been with parents who have advanced degrees in the STEM subjects.

One failure mode we have seen more than once is an attempt to 'augment' this program with additional materials, almost always more complicated math topics ("how about adding a few cool lessons from MathCounts?") that have the potential to overwhelm the student, especially when the additional material is piled on top of this program rather than substituting for parts of it. Your child already has a regular math curriculum at school and this program is an add-on. If you 'augment' it with additional topics then he/she will have 3 math programs on top of each other! Too much! Don't get me wrong: MathCounts is a wonderful program but layering even parts of it on top of our program is a mistake.
Advice: Either
  • use this program as is or ...
  • use another one that you like or ...
  • substitute parts of this program with another program, keeping the work level the same
to augment your child's regular math instruction, but don't stack 'em!

Finally, one last way this program can be misused: accepting kids that are struggling with their regular math curriculum. Trying to teach kids advanced math when they are having trouble with standard 5th grade math is a recipe for failure and has the potential of turning a kid off to math permanently!
This is NOT a remedial math program!

Remember, this is a powerful program, but like all powerful things, it can be misused, potentially causing damage instead of instilling in the student a life-long interest in math, which is our main objective.
Be careful!

Friendly advice:
If you are starting the program later than September, then just select a subset of the lessons for that year. Don't try to cram the entire curriculum into a January-May time frame.
Good luck with your program!