Math-U-See is a fairly new Math program, designed especially for homeschoolers, which runs from Kindergarten all the way through high school. The author is a former high school Math teacher who has attempted to balance a solid conceptual understanding of math with enough practice to let it "sink in." The program consists of a student text (workbook format), a teacher's manual, and optional practice sheets, special Math-U-See blocks and a teacher training DVD. I am very impressed with this program. The author does a fine job of allowing the students to become well aquainted with using numbers. I found math concepts very easy to explain to my daughter with the use of the very clever manipulatives (which might be thought of as a cross between "Base-ten Blocks" and Cuisinaire Rods). I was particularly impressed with how clearly place value is taught and how thoughtfully the child is prepared for future lessons (e.g. early on in addition, the child starts doing simple "solve for the unknown" problems in preparation for subtraction). Other skills learned include telling time, measurement and a heavy emphasis on skip counting (in preparation for future multiplication and factoring). My only complaint is that some of the material is contained only in the teacher's manual (I can imagine that this might have been done intentionally to force the parent to follow along in the teacher's manual rather than letting the child work entirely on their own. The author demonstrates how each concept works on the DVD so that the parent may more confidently teach the concept to the child.

Over the years we haven't always used Math-U-See as our primary Math text, but we have always found the DVDs and blocks useful no matter what we were using.