Students from upper elementary through high school will learn why algebra works, not just how to use it. This curriculum results from over 30 years spent teaching children, teens, and adults.
Each book in the series is available as both a teacher’s guide and a student workbook for use in a tutoring group, small class, or homeschool.
These books will equip parents with any educational background to teach algebra, using the teacher’s guide as a resource. If you need extra help, contact me. I can also assist you or your child one-on-one if you need the extra help.
Each of the teacher’s guides include different ways of thinking about and explaining each lesson to accommodate children who are gifted, or dyslexic, or prefer nearly any learning style.
The key to teaching algebra successfully is using a curriculum that is as flexible as possible. A child’s learning capabilities grow and develop naturally so a text that fits perfectly at the start of the school year might not work after a few months. This curriculum supports you and your child throughout the whole process.
Lessons are built around individual worksheets that work as a stand-alone curriculum, or as reinforcement and supplemental practice.
This curriculum is designed to accommodate the growing and changing maturity of a child throughout the year.
In order to teach a child with this curriculum, a parent needs one copy of the Teacher Edition and one copy of the Student Workbook for each child.
This first book in the Doodles Do Algebra™ series is focused on mental math. In it, your child will learn to think about abstracting and grouping items in order to make calculations of cost, price, age, and amount. The concept of the unknown, or typically x, is introduced at the end of this book and will be the first topic in the next book in the series.
This second book in the Doodles Do Algebra™ series teaches the concept of the unknown and then covers the basic vocabulary of algebra (called the 29 Articles). The concept of the unknown, x, is introduced at the start of the book as a transition between the mental math your child did in the first book and the abstract vocabulary in the second part of this book that is necessary for your child to really become proficient with algebra.
This third book in the Doodles Do Algebra™ curriculum begins with evaluating equations and then covers the basic mathematical operations within algebra: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of monomials and polynomials. This includes long division of polynomials, something we call the long division waltz.
The fourth in the Doodles Do Algebra™ series is focused on the basics of factoring algebraic expressions and, by extension, learning to find the greatest common divisor and least common multiple of expressions in algebra. All of the techniques in this section will help your child in the more advanced topics covered in the rest of the Doodles Do Algebra™ curriculum. Just as in basic arithmetic, much of solving real-world problems depends on developing the skills necessary to manipulate math to more easily work a problem down to a manageable problem. Factoring is a critically important tool both in arithmetic as well as in algebra.
This fifth book in the Doodles Do Algebra™ series covers basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of algebraic fractions and ends with teaching your child to derive the equation for an infinite series, which today is an advanced topic usually covered in college. In the old days in the United States, children in middle school learned these topics with ease, which is exactly why I created the Doodles Do Algebra™ curriculum.
This, the sixth in the Doodles Do Algebra™ series, focuses on solving simple equations. Your child will use the basic tools they have learned to this point, along with the three common elimination techniques to solve first degree equations with two and more unknowns. The book ends by walking your child through the classic physics problem: when will two messengers meet?
This is the seventh book in the Doodles Do Algebra™ series. It covers advanced topics in algebra that include roots and radicals, powers and exponents. Additionally, the student learns to use the Binomial Theorem, developed by Sir Isaac Newton, which is a practical tool for raising the sum or difference or two quantities to any given power and depends on Pascal’s Triangle.
Copyright Ⓒ 2024 by Kirsten West, PhD. All Rights Reserved
