Cafi Cohen
Author of And What About College?How Homeschooling Leads to the Best Colleges and Universities and Homeschooling: Teens
Wildridge Software and the Bangs family have done it again. Unit Two, of their series A Bigger World – titled Math and Music – is perfect for high school homeschoolers who want enough projects and reading to cover science, history, math, and music.
This curriculum comes as a CD-ROM. On the CD are 18 multimedia exercises, study questions and progress reports, an audio glossary, access to math and music web sites, and options to print a complete textbook, teacher guide, student guide, and math workbook.
The math topics cover operations review, abacus, tallies, ancient number systems, bases, primes, ratios, fractions, trigonometry, areas, Pythagorean Theorem. Any student who has completed advanced arithmetic and elementary algebra as well as students who have completed more advanced algebra and trigonometry will enjoy and receive valuable instruction and reinforcement from this unit study. There’s enough depth for students who love math as well as enough integration with music and other topics to entice math-phobic students.
The music topics include musical scales, harmony and history, music around the world, music through time, anatomy of the ear, physics of sound, and much more. Almost every homeschooling family I know seeks ways to enhance their children’s music background. As a private piano teacher, I can tell you that this computer-based CD-ROM enriches practice and performance far beyond what private music lesson teachers have time for.
Aside from the principal foci – math and music – this unit study outshines most curricula in several ways. No dumbing-down here. The material is entertaining without decaying into "cutesy-ness." Students can create their own up-to-date texts with the web references provided.
As a homeschooling mom emeritus, a math aficionado, and a lifelong piano teacher, this title had me salivating before I even examined the contents. I was not disappointed. Certainly, if I were homeschooling teenagers today, I would use every part of this unit study.