Hi, I'm Jenny Phillips. I'm excited to give you a look inside the Simply Good and Beautiful Math K
course. And if you have any questions that aren't answered in this video, leave a comment and I will
answer your questions! Simply Good and Beautiful math courses are perfect for homeschool families
who want a strong academic math foundation with courses that are engaging, open and go, easy
to teach, meaningful, and lessons that are just the right length. Simply Good and Beautiful math
has two components. It has the math box and it has the coursebook, which is 253 pages long and we'll
take a look at that in a minute. First, let's look at the math box. The wooden math box is small
and simple with a sliding lid. It's easy to store and it's quick to access the items that you need.
So let's look at the items in the math box. First, we have these three adorable wooden
cars. They have numbers on the side that are used in games in the course book and they're used in a
lot of fun different ways inside the course which I'll go over later. We have four wooden dice.
Two of them are equation dice and two of them are number dice. And then we have
counting sticks. These counting sticks are used in many different ways in the course
and I will show you some of those ways as well. The other thing that we have are two game pawns
that are used in the course. Just so nice to have them right here when you need them.
Okay, let's take a look at the Good and Beautiful Math K course! Every lesson starts with an opening
box, and this opening box is review items that you're usually going to do aloud with the child
and you can go ahead and do these items if the child doesn't have them mastered, or just do them
as a review, or skip them if they are mastered. So in this lesson here, it says count to 40,
identify the colors below, memorize a parent's phone number. Just a quick simple thing. I'm just
going to go through a little bit of this lesson to show you how the lessons are interactive and
use some of the items from the math box. So this says "take a counting stick from the math box."
Look how quickly I was able to do that. It says "read to the child and point to the numbers". So
you say "here are numbers 0 and 12." So this is what the lesson is about: teaching the numbers
0 and 12. "Point to the zero with a counting stick." This is what you're telling the child.
So the child is going to use the counting stick to point to the number. "This is zero. It means
none." So then it tells the parent to hold out an empty hand, and then you read "How many counting
sticks do I have in my hand?" Zero. "How many feathers grow on your nose?" Zero. We make the
kids laugh. We have them interacting with the course. Then we say "Use your counting stick to
point to the number zero on the number line. What number does it come right before?" Number one.
"In the yellow boxes above, tap the number 12 12 times." So the child is going to tap the number 12
12 times. And then we give the child all of the counting sticks in the math box and have them
count out 12 of the sticks. And then we say "Cross out the boxes below that have zero clocks."
And then we go here to use 10 sticks for another activity and then they're going
to go ahead and do this page of addition which is review. So in Math K, we have
the parent doing the lesson the entire time with the child and in Math 1, 2, and Math 3, there are
is a small parent lesson and then independent work for the child. Math 4 and above is mainly
student-directed. So you'll notice in these Math K courses that there's not independent sections,
although they can do sections independently like this. Most kids can sit there and do this
independently, but the lessons are only 10 to 12 minutes long. And when your child has to also be
doing handwriting and language arts and reading during the day, we have found that a 10- to
12-minute math lesson is just right. The other thing that's nice about these shorter lessons
is that you are able to do more than one lesson a day if your child is going through them faster
and that allows you to move at the pace that your child needs to move. These lessons are
so very carefully designed to pack in just as much learning as longer courses might do
but to do it in a shorter amount of time. So let's look at another
lesson here. This one teaches one more, one less, and we're going to use the theme of bunnies here.
So most lessons use a theme or we'll have a little story but they're short and the focus is on the
math and the concepts that you're learning, but it's fun for the kids. So they'll go ahead and
do this fun activity and you can see the opening section here says to write the numbers 15, 16,
17, and 18 on the whiteboard, watch the days of the week song on the Good and the Beautiful Kids
YouTube channel, point to the equal sign, point to the plus sign. Again,
if they know all this you can skip it and just get right to the lesson. Okay, we're going to
move on here and I'll kind of give you a flip through here so you can see some pages as I
go along. We also have assessments that go after every unit and this will help you, the parent,
kind of know what the child might need more help with and to see what they have learned all
throughout the course. Okay, another thing that this course does is that it incorporates faith. It
incorporates God and this is one example. In this lesson, they're learning about the hundreds chart
and we tell them of the story about Jesus that told the story about a shepherd that had a hundred
sheep and one of them wandered away. And we use that with the hundreds chart. In addition, they're
going to do activities with this. They're going to again get out their counting stick and they're
going to do some activities on this hundreds chart and then do these sheep searches. All right, so
we'll go on here to another lesson. You'll notice that we have spatial activities--whole lessons
that are on spatial activities which are so fantastic for the kids. They're actually going to
do spatial activities throughout the course using their wooden dice and using the counting sticks to
copy different formations. That makes them really have to think spatially as they do
different activities so the components in the math boxes are used in many different ways.
Here is an example of a lesson that is using the car. So the child gets to use a car.
We're practicing ordinal numbers. We're reviewing ordinal numbers here,
so you're going to have the child say "Drive to the fourth sign and tell me what is on it and tell
me what the shape is and tell me what the color is." So our lessons have a lot of review just
incorporated naturally right into it because this is reviewing shapes and it's reviewing
colors at the same time that we're working on ordinal numbers.
So we teach time in Level K and we do not have a clock in the math box because time is
taught more heavily in Math 1 and above. So we do have a clock in our Math 1 box and above, but if
you want to get a clock on Amazon or something to use with your child you can. Otherwise,
all the clockwork that they need is right in the coursebook. We have a lot of diversity in
our math courses. That was a really heavy focus for us, something we feel is so important
for our children, and I just want to show you an example of how stories are incorporated into the
lessons. Not every story, not every lesson has a story. We really want to focus on the math
but connecting it to real life. But in this lesson, in many lessons, there's a story that
runs throughout the lesson. So it says "This is Nala. She has an exciting day ahead because she
gets to pick a kitten to be her new pet. She is going to visit a few places to look at kittens
and then choose the best one. We're going to follow her as she visits the kittens. But first,
let's learn how to tell time to the hour." And you go through this whole thing as they are practicing
learning time to the hour. I'll just flip through some more pages here so you can get an idea of
what the coursebook looks like. This is actually the first one off the press! We
do not have pattern blocks or tangrams in our math box for Math K, but we have them
in higher-level math boxes. But we do have some lessons where you're going to
cut out some pattern blocks and do some basic activities with those, but again
you can get pattern blocks easily on Amazon if you want to do more work with that with your child.
This example here of how we use some of our
manipulatives. we use the counting sticks here in our whole--part--part mats. You don't have to go
try to dig out a mat and find it. It's just so quick so you don't lose that child's focus
while you're working on this and then you're gonna have hands-on. So even though there's
not a ton of manipulatives, the course is actually very hands-on and very interactive.
All right. I'm going to flip here to
more near the end. So one thing you'll notice about the course is we do not have a separate
calendar component. We found in our piloting that it was so much easier to have whole lessons that
were on the calendar that were right in the book. They don't need to be doing it every
single day. You only have so much time and we're trying to use that time as wisely as possible,
so we have lessons that are about the calendar, beautiful lessons. So in this lesson, we're
talking about this boy from Scotland and these things that he is doing, and it's making it really
come to life through a story about the calendar and you're going to find the calendar in lots of
different lessons. Okay, so one thing I wanted to show you too is that there are games throughout
the course where you're going to be using the game pawns or other things. So, for example,
here's a skating pond game where you're going to be using your different pawns for different
activities and kids love games. They love hands-on things, so we have packed our courses
with those things. Let me just end by showing you another couple of fun, beautiful lessons. Here
this is where they learn the months of the year. And again, we have our calendar work right in the
course. It's so easy for you, the parent. When you are teaching multiple children math each day,
it needs to be feasible and possible for you to do and yet a beautiful, wonderful
experience. So we are really excited for the Simply Good and Beautiful math. We hope it's a
blessing for your family and again, any questions that you have go ahead and comment below.
We are excited for you to try this course with your family and remember that our Simply
Good and Beautiful math courses levels *K THROUGH SIX* are completely free.