Review ~ TouchMath
With a family with many different learning styles, I'm always looking at math programs looking for that perfect fit for each child.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
So I was super excited when we had the opportunity to review TouchMath 2nd grade program.
TouchMath is designed to work with all learning styles visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Their program uses visual touch points on each number for students to learn to count up and down.
Since many of our children are right-brain learners, this picture number system has been a big hit here.
We received the download version of the Second Grade Program. This consists of 4 units and each unit is broken down into 6 modules.
Unit A ~ Adding and Subtracting Within 50
Adding and Subtracting Within 13
Adding and Subtracting Within 20
Adding and Subtracting Within 50
Adding With Regrouping
Subtracting With Regrouping
Adding and Subtracting With Regrouping
Unit B ~ Adding and Subtracting Within 100
Understanding Place Value: 100s, 10s, and 1s
Counting and Reading to 1000
Reading and writing to 1000
Understanding Multiplication
Adding Within 100
Subtraction Within 100
Unit C ~ Adding and Subtracting Within 1000
Adding and Subtracting Multiples of 10 and 100
Adding and Subtracting Within 100
Adding Three-Digit Numbers
Subtracting Three-Digit Numbers
Adding and Subtracting Three-Digit Numbers
Reviewing Multiplication
Unit D ~ Time, Money, Measurement, data, and Geometry.
Telling Time
Learning About Money
Representing and Interpreting Data
Measuring, Comparing, and Estimating Length
Relating Addition and Subtraction to Length
Analyzing Shapes.
This video shows a sample lesson on teaching counting with TouchMath. More video demos can be watched on their How it Works page.
Each unit is packed with a LOT of information and resources including, an implementation guide, progress monitoring sheets, lesson plans, worksheets, answer keys, and vocabulary.
With this program, the work is really all done for you. Each weekend I would print out the lessons for the coming week and read over the module.
The Module Overview contains a short paragraph that describes the content of this section. I love that it clearly showed what the objectives were, also what your child needed to know before starting.
The Instructional Strategies walk you through each lesson and explain how to use the activity pages. I love that the answers are included as a completed sample worksheet with each lesson. This makes it quick and easy to find.
Both my daughter and I loved the style of the activity sheets. They are clearly laid out without any extra clutter. The questions are in a large font and not too many to each page. I found this made it very friendly to the student and didn't overwhelm her.
I love how they place an empty box above a column when a number is to be carried. This is a great visual for a young child and stopped the forgetting to carry problems.
We also received a great selection of manipulatives that work with the main program. While these are an optional part of the program, they are a wonderful help and we used them with each lesson.
The Student Number Cards come in a pack of 10 and are perforated so you can separate them or leave them as a full sheet. Laminating these is a good idea! One side of the card shows the counting order of the touchpoints and the other side shows just the touchpoints. These are a great visual help.
I also really like the Flip Cards. There are a huge number of these in each box and we used these to practice lessons or to replace the worksheets some days.
The Touch Numerals with Base 10, are foam numerals and manipulatives that my kids just loved! This was the first thing they got into when I opened the box. It wasn't long before these were spread around the table and they were making games up with them.
We were also given a copy of their TouchMath Tutor CD. This is a wonderful math program and our computer loving children think it's great! This is very well done and I highly recommend this CD. It's also great for the crazy days when Mom needs math lessons done, but there is no way a paper lesson is going to work out.
We used this as our main math program for the past month and have really enjoyed this one. I wish I had found it sooner!
We started off with Unit A even though dd7 is quite good at adding and subtracting already. Since the program follows a different order from what we have been using, I found there were still many new things for her to learn.
TouchMath recommends working with math for 2 to 2 1/2 times the age of your child working on math every day. For us this would be 14 to 18 minutes per day, so we found 20 worked out very well for us. Added to this was self-practice with the CD Tutor and other math games.
This program is on the higher side of the price for a math program, for what I would normally look at. But if it works well for our children I would think it's worth it, and we can reuse it with multiple children lowering the total cost. This could easily be used as a full program or purchased in units for extra work on areas of challenge.
