I am wondering if the Math U See primer and alpha teacher manual are necessary? Is it simple enough for me to explain without having to purchase those? Did you find the DVD’s helpful? Wondering if I should just purchase the student book or all of it? I already have the blocks
Hi, I would say forget about the teacher’s book for both. I never once used it for either level. As for the DVDS…out of the two I would say get the primer. That way your child will get the feel of how math u see works. We used the primer all the time just because I wanted my child to know how he was teaching it, but we hardly used it for alpha. Hope that might give you a little help. 
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I only purchased the student book for both of those levels for my 3 kids over the years. 
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Thank you so much for your input. This is very helpful
My opinion would be that either the teachers manual or the DVD would be necessary, but not both. They both pretty much get the point across about what is supposed to be taught. I know it is common to not get a teachers manuals for simpler subjects (we all know how to add and subtract) but I have always thought that if you are going to pay for a program at all one of the most important things you should be getting from it is the wisdom of people with more experience actually teaching the subject. Sometimes there are just magic ways to say or explain things that we would not think of on our own and those things are not in the student worksheet books. That is just my two cents (although I can see the point that it really is just addition and subtraction and how hard can it be to teach.) I think what might also be considered is how math oriented the student is. A student who is having trouble may benefit a lot from hearing it explained on the DVD from someone who has more experience.
Agree. Not necessary. I bought everything for both my students this year. We are in the 6th week of school and I never use the teachers manual or the test book. Student notebook, DVD and the occasional Youtube video + me are all we need.
You would need either the teacher manual OR the videos, because they are what show actually how to teach it (both show basically the same thing, but the videos you can see, and the manual goes into a little bit more of the why behind it sometimes…but you could do fine with either one. The workbook is just practice…it doesn’t contain any actual instruction. If you were going to just get the workbook I say just get any cheap generic math workbook and it would work just about as well…because it’s the instruction that really sets this apart. The practice is fairly ho-hum and some of it wouldn’t even make much sense without the instruction. The test booklet is just really extra workbook pages and is fairly unnecessary.
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