To Kumon or not to Kumon. That is the question.

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DD is starting school in September. Below are the Pros and Cons I have been debating recently.

1. She is bright, so should be okay without extra help in school
2. It is too early to put her through this
3. Kumon is expensive and time consuming.

The Pros

1. It may give her that bit of extra confidence at school
2. Earlier is better as then she can grow with that system
3. Its not so expensive as to be prohibitive.

I really cant decide either way. Please someone help?

Would I use Kumon if it were free? .......no! would I use Kumon if they paid me to send my children to them ........no!
sorry iyatoda never been to Ibiza and have never smoked ...bang goes another theory.

Keep going, iyatoda.

You sound charming.

Tbh if someone was paying me for the time I spend teaching my kids maths I'd be raking it in. I'd be much more expensive than kumon :o

I would also not send my children to Kumon if you paid me. Although I have a feeling that DS2 would quite like to do worksheets - I don't want his mathematical brain to be developed in that way. As I type, DS1 is playing chess, and DS2 is telling me how many days, hours and minutes until his fifth birthday.

So far, as a Kumon hater, I've been told that I'm simply jealous of people who use kumon, and that I'm a cheap-skate in the 6-pack/fags/ibiza sector. I reiterate my comment above about use of kumon being correlated to dimness of parent.

I've been to Ibiza! [helpful]

I'm with Quip - I didn't say I did hours of maths per day with my child, I said that my child has, at various points, chosen to spend almost all his waking hours on maths-related activities.

You might not have recognised them as maths-related - creation of imaginary results tables from an imaginary World Cup from all the best teams from different years, for example. Each game documented, each table recalculated down to goal difference etc (obviously including negative numbers), graphs of top scorers for each country etc etc. Followed by board games, followed by a walk up to the park adding together all the house numbers as you go and reading all the 6 digit numbers on the telegraph poles. Help with cooking supper and with sharing it out....

My input would be to answer questions (and, obviously, to compete on the house numbers game, where I have to see if my side of the road has a bigger or smaller total than his, and to play the board games).

I suspect that we have different views of what 'maths' is.

We used to spend long car journeys adding the digits on car number plates to see which had the highest total/who could get the correct answer before the car was out of sight. Count how many blue cars we passed in 5 minutes. Made tally charts of models/colours of cars to see which was most common.

multiply the first digit of the number plate by the last, use the digits to produce a number sentence with the highest/smallest answer using +,-, \ and x

(And then make a silly sentence using words starting with each of the letters in the numberplate )

I once set them to pick the company name on various lorries convert the letters to numbers and find the total ...bliss

I bet if the governemnet was paying for it, then the arguement would be different. CHEAP SKATES. Save your money and buy your 6 packs, fags and holiday to Ibiza.

You don't know MN very well, do you, iyatoda.

May I suggest that if you are really so bereft of a sensible argument that you seriously think it's a good idea to come a thread and shout 'CHEAPSKATES', and to go down the line of benefit scrounger stereotyping that you perhaps try Bounty or Nethuns?

and perhaps sign up for Kumon spelling

I keep mine quiet in church services by telling them to add up the hymn numbers.

All these lazy mums who can't be arsed to interact with their children and send them to Kumon while they just watch Jeremy Kyle and do their nails all day............

This thread is very funny now.

I can't get over the image of iyatoda running in, shouting 'CHEAPSKATES' and running off again.

Mrz- I used to do that too when I was little! I'd assign a number to each letter of the alphabet, then divide the total by the number of letters in the word. I was a bit of a loser unique child.

There are two kids in my class who go to Kumon. Their multiplication tables are great, but their general understanding is all over the place, and they are so confused by the methods they've been taught.

juniper I still add up digits in phone numbers and play with number patterns
I've even managed to convince my class the 9X table is magical

We used to have endless games on long car journeys to pass the time-much better than giving them electronic gadgets and ignoring them.

Honestly, there are some very unpleasant posts on both sides of this 'debate'. The competitiveness of parents on both sides of the argument is just plain daft (competitive creative maths is a new one). I've said earlier that I sent my children to K for a couple of years. It was very good at reinforcing one aspect of maths. It was expensive and boring but it helped DS1 in particular to concentrate for short periods and to calculate quickly and accurately. He was 8, not 3, when he started. Believe me, we had done all the door numbers and dividing sweets and cooking and car games. We had cupboards full of dominoes and chess and playing cards and Orchard Games and marble runs and bricks and jigsaws. We found that the routine of Kumon massively improved mechanical arithmetic skills, just as practising scales for a short period every day helps you become a very good musician. Could we have done it another way? No doubt. Did it achieve what I wanted? Yes.

So, is it an accepted truth that forcing a child to sit down for 10 minutes a day doing extremely dull and repetitive arithmetic drill, improves their concentration? Because I've always believed that children will concentrate anyway, when they're interested and absorbed in the subject at hand.

Although that's not my main objection to Kumon. I get frustrated with the belief that instructing them how to do mathematical processes by drill and repeating it over and over, just gives rise to the mistaken belief that their maths has "improved" or, to coin a phrase I've often seen used on these threads "come on in leaps and bounds." I'm not sure how people measure that in their children, actually.

And practising scales on the piano (or any instrument) is useful purely to increase manual dexterity - it will not make a musician out of anyone.

I don't think it improves-I can't mention it again having done it twice-but it is like my theory of music, fantastic by drill but clueless on how to use it!!
It depends on what you believe that Maths is for. If you think that it is for getting a whole page of sums right-then I expect that Kumon meets your needs.

Exactly - practising scales improves manual dexterity and pattern recognition so takes care of some of the mechanical part of playing an instrument. That in turn and in time makes it easier for the player to concentrate on developing higher level musical skills. Rote maths drills embed the mechanical parts of arithmetic. When my son knew his maths facts instantly, he was able to concentrate on the problem or, if you like, to understand the real maths on hand without panicking about the arithmetical element. That's what it did for him.
As for concentration, I don't know if it's a 'truth universally acknowledged', but timed drills helped my mildly dyspraxic/ADHD traits son focus on things he wasn't interested in. Which was always anything outside his current obsession, so not as simple as saying 'make maths interesting'.
I'm not a Kumon evangelist by any means, but I think it can have a useful role for certain children.

And I don't think any of the teachers on this thread are denying that mechanical processes have their place and function. But I don't believe that that place is an appropriate one for a 4 year old who hasn't yet started school - which is where we began this thread.

And children don't do K in a vacuum. It was supplementing all the wider maths he was doing at school and all the games we played and the real life problems we encountered. I don't for a moment think maths is only about getting a page of sums right, any more than writing is only about getting a list of spellings right (ditto music and scales). Kumon is limited and expensive, but it can help with one thing.

Not when they are older singergirl-but we are talking about a 4 yr old who is in a vacuum.