FAQs, Helps, and Extras

Each child will need his or her own set of consumable Course Books.

If the children are being taught as a group, ideally each child should have their own Math Activity Box. Sharing the manipulatives in the Math Activity Box would render the lessons less effective and cause them to take a much longer amount of time.

If the children are being taught individually, the Math Activity Box may be shared; however, each child will need their own “My Calendar.”

The Good and the Beautiful Math supports traditional methods by teaching basic math facts and universally recognized traditional algorithms. Children memorize math facts, but our math program is not based solely on rote memorization but also on gaining a deep understanding of numbers and relationships among numbers. Our strong emphasis on developing a solid number sense leads naturally into helping children understand the reasoning and application of standard algorithms. Children quickly learn and memorize mathematical algorithms when they first understand what the numbers and operations represent.

Our math program avoids the following items:

• confusing and ambiguous methods that require complex explanations to solve basic operations
• an emphasis on the process with lack of regard to the answer (We believe both the process and the answer are equally important.)
• story problems and examples that do not support traditional values and/or strong family relations

The Good and the Beautiful math curriculum offers a balanced approach to teaching mathematics. The curriculum includes components of multiple styles and begins with concrete, hands-on learning then moves gradually to a conceptual understanding of math. The curriculum is written with a real-life, “living-math” approach. It is also written to meet the needs of many different learning styles—including visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.

The Good and the Beautiful math curriculum offers a balanced approach of both mastery and spiral learning.

Though our math curriculum is extremely thorough and academically strong, it is not considered advanced (Math K is kindergarten level, Math 1 is first grade level, and so on).

Our Math Curricula Comparison chart is a helpful document with a comparison of concepts covered in The Good and the Beautiful Math and six other popular programs plus a review of price and all standards covered.

For the quality and thoroughness received and the fact that all materials are beautiful, full-color (which is much more expensive to print), The Good and the Beautiful pricing is amazing! The math course sets may seem more expensive than other The Good and the Beautiful products, but they are not priced at a higher profit margin than our other products. You will notice that the math course books are priced the same as similar length language arts books, but then you also have to add in our math activity boxes which contain a large number of resources that help add variety and effectiveness to the program. Because of the amount of expertise and illustration required for the math courses, our profit margin on the math products is actually less than most of our other products, while the math products take up the largest amount of space in our warehouse. We truly have gone to great efforts to make this math program as affordable as possible!