His Treasure Seekers

Our Classical Conversations community starts next week, and as I prepare to take my Challenge class through The Math Map (TMM), as well as using it at home with my four youngest children, I thought I’d share some tips each week from things I’ve learned over the last 3 years of using TMM.

Tips for this lesson:

• The Lesson 1 booklet is really helpful because it explains the different components of TMM and what to expect. However, it’s laid out differently than all the other booklets, so it tends to throw people off. I encourage parents to read through the entire Ex Nihilo booklet before attempting to do it with their students.
• Be sure to spend some time attending to the top left corner of the Invention page (p. i²). Every lesson that introduces a new dimension (Lessons 1, 3, 9, 19, 23, and 27) will follow this format.
• Note the way the domains are listed using a different font. Once students are aware of this, they’ll see them popping up throughout TMM.
• If you have younger students, make this a light week. Pages 1-16 are normally the lesson pages that the students work on, but in Lesson 1, it’s a lot of reading. Just pick 1 or 2 things to discuss each day.
• Be sure to introduce Lesson 29 Seeing the Unseen, which is a blank booklet intended to be worked on all year. Lesson 1 Ex Nihilo explains how to use it on p. 1, and then the bottom portion of each of the remaining pages gives examples of the kinds of things students might add to their Seeing the Unseen booklets. In my experience, this takes a lot of practice and encouragement, but it’s also a great way for the kids to engage with math in the world around them.
• Don’t skip the Flashcards! See p. 4 of Ex Nihilo. Even just 5 minutes a day makes a huge difference. We set a timer and everyone goes through a set of 5-15 cards they’re working on. It’s important not to do too many at one time! On Thursdays, the kids give me the ones they think they’ve mastered, and then on Friday, I meet with each of them and check them on ALL the cards they’ve mastered so far. (Well, once they’d finished memorizing their addition facts, we dropped those. But we review multiplication facts if they’ve just learned them in the last year, and then any Notations cards they’ve learned. (I love the sets sold by CC. My ChB student has memorized all the Fractions and Notations cards, so now he’s working on the Trigonometry set.)

Other helps: When I first started to dive into TMM, I jotted down notes of things that might be helpful as I taught each week’s concepts.

• I wanted to review some of the concepts for Lesson 1 by watching the corresponding Book Club videos. I decided to make a playlist of all the episodes that are about Lesson 1 or 0D, and I figured I’d share it. So if you’re looking for videos discussing Lesson 1: Ex Nihilo, you can find them here: YouTube Playlist of Book Club videos about Lesson 1 or 0D
• In one of the Book Club episodes, someone recommended eventually memorizing the table on p. i³ of Ex Nihilo, starting with the first column (a list of dimension characteristics). I recorded a simple song to help us get started with that. (Looking back, that was way too ambitious for our first tour through TMM. But hey, someday I might find it helpful!)

Ever since diving into The Math Map when it was rolled out for all Classical Conversations Challenge A classes a few years ago, I have spent countless hours trying to figure out how to best utilize it both at home with my own kids and as a tutor in Community. Consequently, I’ve had lots of people in the various CC communities around us come to me with questions because they know I’ve already wrestled through some of the things that come up when looking at The Math Map for the first time. As we prepare to start this school year, I realized the easiest way to share what I’ve learned would be to blog week by week as I plan out what I’m going to discuss with my class and/or with my students at home.

If you’re tutoring in a community that’s already started, I’m sorry! I probably won’t post more than a week ahead of our own schedule. But hopefully this series will be helpful to at least a few CC parents out there trying to figure out The Math Map as they tutor or use it at home with their own students. (Be sure to check out CC’s document “The Math Map: Where to Begin.”)

Just for reference, here’s my experience so far with various domains of TMM, so if it looks like I’ve done something you have a question about, ask away!

• Spring 2023 Before introducing it to my children or tutoring TMM, I did all the pages of the Naturals domain myself. (I highly recommend this for all parents using the curriculum)
• Summer of 2024 We did one lesson a day for 6 weeks before CC started. My youngest 2 did the first 4 pages of Digits, and 3 of my older kids did the first 4 pages of Naturals in preparation for the school year. (Our family takes May and June off, starting up again after 4th of July and easing into the habit of schoolwork before our CC Community starts meeting in August.)
• 2024-25 School year, I used TMM as our sole math curriculum for my younger 4 and tutored it in Challenge A.
  • Complex: I did all the lesson pages myself so I could better help the families in my class. I just had my own ChA student copy 4 pages a day from the Solutions. (There are just so many new things coming at them in ChA, and I didn’t want her to feel overwhelmed and want to give up. I did about 90% of my own pages this way as well and learned SO much. Don’t be afraid to just use it as copywork!)
  • Fractions: My 11-year old was prepping for ChA the following year. He went through the lesson pages pretty independently.
  • Naturals: My 7 and 9 year olds both went through Naturals. My 7 year old flew through all 30 lessons by Christmas and went back to her former curriculum second semester because I didn’t feel she was ready for Fractions. (Note: this was when the lower domains were available digitally on CCConnected, so we didn’t have the booklets with the front and back pages, which I’ve since learned are CRUCIAL to using TMM successfully. This meant we weren’t having a lot of “math discussions,” so my daughter just kept working through all the practice pages in the book I’d printed and bound for her.)
• Summer of 2025 Again, we did one lesson a day (4 pages from each) for 6 weeks before CC started. My youngest 2 worked in Decimals, my 11-year old (about to turn 12 and start ChA) worked in Rationals, and my rising ChB student worked in Reals. (Those domains were pretty easy for the older two, but I wasn’t looking for a challenge, just a review.)
• 2025-26 School year
  • My ChB and ChA students went through Monomials and Complex. I also used these domains to lead discussions on TMM with my ChII class in community each week since none of them were using Saxon Algebra 2 at home. We went over concepts from the i² and i³ pages, then looked at examples from the lesson pages. SO many amazing Aha! moments came out of these conversations!
  • I purchased the Integers booklets for my 8- and 10-year olds. I wanted to keep the family together on the same week, so if either of them wanted more, I had them do the Decimals pages for that week as well. (I had downloaded them from CCConnected when they were available digitally.)
• Summer 2026 As we had done the past two summers, we did a quick run through the entire Math Map, touching one lesson each day in the 6 weeks before CC. After several years, I finally felt like we were using TMM as intended. Each day we explored the i² and i³ pages as a family, asking each of them to find something familiar on each page (starting with the youngest and working up). I was amazed at some of the things they noticed, and thrilled at how my Challenge students remember things they’d discussed in class. We took about 15-20 minutes to go through those each day, and then each student went back through their booklets from last year and either filled in incomplete pages or did the Careful Calculations page in the back. (Neither of my Challenge students had completed 100% of their booklets.) If my 9- and 10-year olds had already finished a booklet, they did 4 pages in the Decimals since I had made the year before.
• 2026-27 School year I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to continue having TMM discussions as a family each day. I’m thinking we’ll focus on a different component each day (e.g. the art, the i² and i³ pages, something from the inside back cover, etc).
  • My ChI and ChB students are going through Binomials and Monomials. I’m tutoring Challenge II, and since again, none of my students are following the Saxon schedule from the Guide, I’ll be planning class conversations around TMM, going through my own set of Binomials books since at least one of my students is doing that at home.
  • My 9- and 11-year olds will be going through the booklets from Fractions and Reals. (I don’t know that their Decimals books will ever be finished, LOL.)

All that to say, I’m pretty familiar with The Math Map and have quite a bit of experience using it both at home and in Community. If you’re ready to dive in, here’s my post about Lesson 1 Ex Nihilo.