Ray's Arithmetic Teacher Guide

I have planned to use Ray’s Arithmetic for our math curriculum since I first thought about homeschooling, more than 5 years ago.  Since we started actually using it two years ago, though, I’ve been struggling to figure out how it was intended to be used.  The books don’t have instructions for the teacher, and the teacher guide that comes with the reprints, by Ruth Beechick, did not satisfy me.  I have several posts on this blog where I’ve analyzed Charlotte Mason’s arithmetic recommendations and explained how I’ve adjusted Rays to fit those, but I still didn’t think I was using the material as effectively as I’d like.  (Fortunately, my oldest has natural math ability so she hasn’t been bothered too much by all this.)

On the Ray’s Arithmetic Yahoo group I learned some time ago about the Eclectic Manual of Methods, which is a teacher guide for a variety of materials including the McGuffey Readers and Rays Arithmetic.  I found working from a pdf copy of the book to be off-putting so I never really approached it.  In fact, I didn’t even look closely enough to realize that the arithmetic section of that manual was quite short .  (It begins on page 105 of the pdf copy.)  I did try to find a hardcopy, but they are few and far between.  (The only one I can find right now is located in Germany and would cost me over $20 including shipping.)

I finally sat down with the text copy and the pdf copy of the manual and created a Word document with just the arithmetic section.  I’ve included all of it except one long table of exercises that I just couldn’t bring myself to type in–that part you’ll have to go to the pdf copy to see.

I haven’t yet read through this in detail and tried to compare it with CM’s recommendations, but from my cursory review while editing I would say that it generally does follow the same outline that CM recommended in Volume 1.  I’m sure I’ll post more about this as I dig into it further–I’ll be using at least years 1 and 3 of this guide very soon.

Ray's Arithmetic Teacher Guide

I have planned to use Ray’s Arithmetic for our math curriculum since I first thought about homeschooling, more than 5 years ago.  Since we started actually using it two years ago, though, I’ve been struggling to figure out how it was intended to be used.  The books don’t have instructions for the teacher, and the teacher guide that comes with the reprints, by Ruth Beechick, did not satisfy me.  I have several posts on this blog where I’ve analyzed Charlotte Mason’s arithmetic recommendations and explained how I’ve adjusted Rays to fit those, but I still didn’t think I was using the material as effectively as I’d like.  (Fortunately, my oldest has natural math ability so she hasn’t been bothered too much by all this.)

On the Ray’s Arithmetic Yahoo group I learned some time ago about the Eclectic Manual of Methods, which is a teacher guide for a variety of materials including the McGuffey Readers and Rays Arithmetic.  I found working from a pdf copy of the book to be off-putting so I never really approached it.  In fact, I didn’t even look closely enough to realize that the arithmetic section of that manual was quite short .  (It begins on page 105 of the pdf copy.)  I did try to find a hardcopy, but they are few and far between.  (The only one I can find right now is located in Germany and would cost me over $20 including shipping.)

I finally sat down with the text copy and the pdf copy of the manual and created a Word document with just the arithmetic section.  I’ve included all of it except one long table of exercises that I just couldn’t bring myself to type in–that part you’ll have to go to the pdf copy to see.

I haven’t yet read through this in detail and tried to compare it with CM’s recommendations, but from my cursory review while editing I would say that it generally does follow the same outline that CM recommended in Volume 1.  I’m sure I’ll post more about this as I dig into it further–I’ll be using at least years 1 and 3 of this guide very soon.

Advice to New Moms (or Dads) With a Crying Baby

Babies are each unique creatures and we can never know all that is going on with them. I’m no baby expert, but I’ve had four and none of mine were the easy, happy, eat-for-ten-minutes-and-sleep-for-three-hours kind of baby. I had one preemie with nursing issues, one high-needs, and two colicky (and the colic lasted for months).

Lots of things can go on with a baby unbeknownst to Mom, and the baby cries and Mom doesn’t know why. It is never wrong to comfort a crying baby, but it is also ok to put a crying baby down in a safe place when you need a few minutes to yourself.  Slings are a great way to soothe babies and still permit yourself some freedom. (I particularly like the Maya Wrap, myself.)

There are lots of things you just cannot know with a baby. You cannot truly know what the baby is feeling physically or emotionally. If you are nursing, you cannot really know how much the baby is getting to eat with each feeding (unless you are weighing the baby with a good scale before and after each feeding – lol). You cannot know how much your particular baby needs to eat, and it can be difficult to determine *what* your baby needs to eat (or shouldn’t eat). (If you’re nursing, foods you eat can cause colic in your baby, and it isn’t always the foods you’d expect–dairy and soy are big culprits, and soy is in just about everything. If you’re bottle-feeding, it can be well nigh impossible to find a formula that doesn’t cause discomfort for your baby if yours has a sensitive stomach.)

Do your best to try to find out what is causing the distress, but understand that you may never figure it out. Your job then is to comfort as best you can.  Pray, pray, pray, and seek out wise advice but don’t be bound by conventional wisdom or the strong opinions of others.
With babies #2 and #3, I had to eliminate dairy from my diet. It was challenging but I did it because they needed it. With baby #3, I probably should have eliminated more than dairy but I was too tired at that point to think it through that far so we just toughed out the colic until he outgrew it.  With baby #4, a wise mom gave me some diet advice and I ended up giving up almost all my normal food and eating a severely restricted diet for many months–but it was absolutely worth it because I had a happy, healthy baby as long as I ate properly. If I didn’t eat properly, I had a baby who screamed for hours at a time.

Whatever you have to do, you *can* do because God provides the strength for the challenges he puts in front of us. That doesn’t make it easy, but at least we have that hope. When these challenges are behind us, we’ll have new ones in front of us, but God helping us we’ll make it past those too.