Frustrated with the New Math Curriculum

We've got a new math program this year, from Scott Foresman Addison Wesley, and I'm not liking it so far.

Take chapter 1, for example. We've started with number combinations, but they don't call it addition. Instead, we're "making 6" and "making 10" without ever using the words plus or equals. I get that showing kids the different facts that make a number would ideally help them with their fact fluency when the time comes, but I really think that missing out on the vocabulary piece is a big, big mistake.

It gets worse. After four days of making groups of numbers we're jumping into "1 and 2 more than" and "1 and 2 less than", again without ever using words like plus, minus, add, take away, or equals. I also have a big problem with doing the addition skill one day and the subtraction skill the next--my experience the last five years has been that if you blend the two like that you're going to confuse half the class, so to avoid that I'm going to have to do some real tap dancing.

After those two lessons we compare numbers (i.e., "5 is less than 7") for a day, then practice putting numbers in order, and end the chapter with a 3-day unit on patterns. There's absolutely zero cohesion unless you use the ancillary spiral review activities, and even then you're reviewing three skills a day when I think that my kids, especially the low ones, need the chance to be completely immersed in one thing at a time.

And not to turn this into a whine, when I've got 25 kids of such diverse abilities as I do this year I'm really being set up for failure by this curriculum. I'm going to need to work 200% as hard with 33% more kids than I had last year, and that's with the family being 50% bigger. I differentiate for reading, but how much should I be expected to do in math?

sigh