Everyday Math is ridiculous.
OUr daughter’s school used Singapore Math and Saxon Math. I would not recomment Saxon Math since the pace is SLLLOOOOWWWWWWW. I would highly recommend Singapore Math. Singapore Math is very good and not a “fad”. Allot of mental math is done in Singapore Math.
This video must be watched if your child’s school uses Everyday Mathmatics or TERC, both “reform math”.
Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI
Our son’s Washington State school used it up until this year, and it is as bad as the lady in the video is saying, even for his last years 2nd grade. The wife and I could not understand the second grade math algorithms and had to send several notes back to the teacher telling her we don’t understand the instructions on problems x through xx, so how are we supposed to help him?
This year after failing math scores district wide and many complaints from parents, they switched to Math Expressions http://www.mathexpression.com/ which is a thousand times better – and more like the basic math we had back in the 60s and 70s