would you recommend kumon for maths and english

[southeastastra]

for a nearly 8 year old who needs to catch up? have tried independent tutor who made no difference at all.

from what I understand, it works on the basis that your child does 5-10 mins a day, every day, to improve their skills, with occasional weekend days at Kumon centres. This is what I was told when i enquired re: my ds (now 7).

I thought it was really expensive though and that I could probably do just as good a job spending time with ds hearing him read, and encouraging to write tbh.

The Kumon class near us charges forty pounds a month. For this the children have a ten page mental maths to do every night, taking around 20 mins. Some pages have more questions than others.
I put my 9 year old on it about 6 months ago as I didn't think he had instant enough recall of simple addition, subtraction and multiplication. Now he is very fast and accurate at it and a lot more confident about maths in general. It has not always been smooth sailing with my DS who can get disheartened quickly, especially if he's not in the mood and making a whole lot of small mistakes.
The parents have to mark the maths every night and record the scores. Once a week the child does that day's maths paper at the Kumon class where they see his progress and give him his next 6 days homework.
There are some children at Kumon who are real whizzes at maths and are years above their school Year level. They go for the fun of it, rather than the grind!

Kumon Maths -Yes, though most children can only stand about 6 months max. of the relentless worksheets -it is very good for teaching instant recall of number bonds, tables etc., all the rote stuff.

Kumon English -No. It's based on faulty mixed methods rather than synthetic phonics.

thanks, will definitely look into the maths one then.

We found the children who did both the maths and English lacked the ability to apply what they had been taught outside the worksheets and that within months of stopping they had regressed totally.

oh really, are you a teacher mrz?

I would give it a try. I think most people see a benefit for a year or so, then it perhaps levels off. It depends how easy it is to get your child to work at home every day. It requires a lot of input from the parent!

Yes I'm a teacher

It is a very different way of working from what they do at school - but won't do any harm to approach things a different way. The idea is to build up speed and accuracy - the work is very formal and old-fashioned.

I would really say it depends on your child. I didn't have a good experience with kumon with my 5year old. I guess it's the age though. We started Kumon in March, mainly because I felt he wasn't being challenged enough at school(reception) he's a really bright kid who really enjoys studying, he always bugged me everyday to give him 'homework' he complained he was bored at school and so we decided to try it out. For the first few weeks, he was so enthusiastic, but after a while, it was becoming quite overwhelming for him having to do it everyday. I tried everything -reward, encourage, bribery, but it didn't help. he began to cry when I asked him to do them and then started saying he 'hated' maths which really scared me, all reports from his teachers even at preschool was that he had excellent mathematical skills, now hearing him saying he hated it.

The final score was when in his sleep one night, he started saying 'mommy I don't want to do kumon anymore'!!! so we eventually stopped after 3months. He's way ahead of his class anyway, I just didn't want it to be counter productive and put him off academics altogether.

Having said that, I think the maths is very good, it makes them think fast and improves their mental arithmetic. You might try it out for your dc who is behind. You and him/her just have to be motivated and hopefully it'll work out for you.