Math on the Go with Math U See

I’ve always been a traditional gal- I love to order physical books. I want to hold them in my hand, and enjoy the feel of the paper, and be able to turn pages and take notes in the margins and use them again and again with each child. Digital products are wonderful (after all, I have a shop full of them!) but even then, I tend to print them all out, and bind them on my own, and enjoy the physical copies.

You can imagine then that when I was first looking at Math U See for Little Miss, I didn’t look terribly close at their Digital Packs. I didn’t think I would need them, and then BOOM, last second we ended up with PCS (move) orders and we were packing and planning a road trip and trying to figure out how to coordinate a new school year while transitioning to our new home.

The first thing I did when we began packing was to get all of the school materials together so I could set them aside. I realized that we have WAY TOO MUCH, and even though I really needed to be able to carry all the materials in the car (we couldn’t risk missing too much school, or losing something in the move), I knew I couldn’t take it all.

I decided then to switch many of our physical materials for digital products. Using a Math U See Digital Pack made perfect sense. We wouldn’t have access to a DVD player in the hotels, and we would be living out of lawn chairs for the first couple weeks in our new home, and the last couple weeks in our old home. The digital pack allowed me to play the instructional videos on my iPad, and pull up the PDF teacher’s manual as well.

The icing on the cake was the Math U See Manipulatives App. I was able to pack all the blocks up for a couple weeks, and rely only on the app while we traveled. That means I was able to go with only an iPad, instead of a teachers manual, DVDs, DVD player and box of math U See blocks. How awesome is that?

I was so worried about falling behind during the move, but in the end, we managed to stay mostly on track with Little Miss and her studies. And, in the process, I managed to fall in love with the digital packs. I don’t know about you, but my family no longer has a DVD player set up. We have the PlayStation that I use to turn on DVDs, but it’s a much longer process to get the disk, stick it in, navigate to it, and get the lesson going. Half the time, the controllers aren’t charged, and the other half of the time, the disk is lost, undoubtedly getting scratched up under a chair or in a drawer or wherever my son stuck it when he decided he wanted to watch Frozen.

It wasn’t working so well for me. With the digital packs, I am able to bookmark the page they are on in my browser and get Little Miss to work right away. No lost disks. No moving to the living room and back at lesson time. We just DO the lesson. I still get all the same materials I would if I had purchased the hard copy books, but they take up much less space, and I can’t lose them, because really, who is going to lose their iPad (knock on wood).

Call me a traitor to my hardcopy books, but I love Math U See and their Digital Packs.