When I talked to a representative from RightStart at a homeschool convention a couple of years ago, I specifically asked if they were good about answering questions on their forums. She said they were. I am very disappointed to find out that she was wrong. I do not have a reply yet from a question posted Tuesday. I was already struggling with RightStart b/c of a lack of instructions/explanations in their teachers guide. I was hoping RightStart would redeem itself by at least answering my questions in a timely manner. That doesn't appear to be the case. Very frustrating.

Jill,

I am sorry you are frustrated. My suggestion when you need a quick answer is to call RightStarts Customer Service. They have others who use the program on call to answer questions.

From what I understand RS is currently in the process of getting someone to answer the emails as the one who was recently doing it had a baby.

I don't have a book in front of me so working from memory I can try to help.

Subtracting left to right was new for me too and took me a while to get use to it....my children on the other hand had no trouble understanding and look at me funny even now when I subtract from the right...

So here goes....just know that trying to explain it in an email is not easy. I tried to underline the numbers but couldn't figure it out...sorry

8146
-4159

Starting at the right you see that

8000
-4000 is possible so we look at the hundreds column

100
-100 is possible so we look at the tens column

40
-50 we don't have enough tens to take from.
We can get more tens by taking some from the hundreds.

So.....the child underlines the 1 to show him he is taking ten 10's [which is 100] from the hundred column and is putting it into the tens column. He will then put a 1 next to the 4 showing the transfer and now he'll have 14 tens...


However...that means there is now a 0 in the hundreds [but you don't show it...the child see's by the underline that one was taken so it's now a 0]....so we need to take from the 1000's....so he would underline the 8 reminding him he took from the 1000's
...and puts a 1 next to the 1

Finally we look at the ones column and see


6
-9 we don't have enough ones to take 9 away from so we need some....we will need to get some from the tens column.

So now we need to underline the 4 to remind us we took from that column....and put a 1 next to the 6 showing he now has 16 ones.

After that it's time to subtract starting on the left...

Since the 8 is underlined he's subtracting 4 [4000] from 7 [7000].......the 1 is underlined so he's subtracting 1 [100] from 10 [1000].......the 4 [40] is underlined so he's subtracting 5 [50] from 13 [130]....and in the ones column [it looks normal to us "old schoolers"] he subtracts 9 from 16

so

8146[pretend the 8,1, and 4 are underlined]
-4159
-------
3987

I hope this is clear....and I apologize if it isn't...it's the best I could do.