Foreign Perspectives

Posts Tagged ‘kumon levels’

We’ve our two little guys enrolled in the Kumon programmes but for different reasons.

Thanks to the disaster that’s French education for the non-French, James kicked off in school here well behind where he should have been. Therefore we enrolled him with a view to catching up with where he should have been at this point just under a year ago. John started school here last September and quickly found it boring so his enrolment in the maths programme was to keep him interested in learning.

After just under a year James has moved through four levels and should be around where he should be in school early next year and seems to be gradually picking up the pace with the Kumon. John starting from the proper level raced through four levels in under four months and shows no sign of slowing that pace so may manage six or seven levels over the 12 months. In fact, both are doing so well that they’re both getting awards for their progress next month.

Ordinarily, the rate of progress is supposed to be around 4 levels in the first year and a couple per year after that which would get you from scratch to calculus in about 10 years and the equivalent in the English programme. However, I suspect that’s a very biased statistic if our Kumon centre is anything to go by basically because a significant number of students have non-native English speaking parents thus it’s being used by them to aid school work (as we’re doing with James) rather than to get the kids ahead. Thus, I’m expecting that the J&J progress rate will be more like 6 or 7 levels in year one and 3 or 4 after that (it obviously gets more difficult when your kids are well ahead of their school work, hence the slowing down) which, in principle, would take John from scratch to calculus over about five or six years.

If they achieve anything like that I guess there’ll be issues by the time they leave primary school but I’m sure it’s better to err on the side of them being too far ahead of their school work than take a chance on them falling behind.

Incidently, for those considering the Kumon programmes or just wanting a preview of what’s coming up, the Loggers Run Kumon centre have a great little website with examples of the sheets and loads more.