Need a little hand holding, I think. (dyslexia challenges)

[mlbuchina]

We've been using Math-U-See with my dd8, and she was doing really well.  She had learned all her addition math facts, and remembered them reasonably well.  Now we are learning subtraction.  Um.  What happened to all the addition facts she knew???  LOL  (I have to laugh, or I'll cry.)

 

Am I truly fighting a losing battle trying to help her learn the math facts?  Surely she will learn them, and not be stuck in simple addition and subtraction forever.  I hate the idea of giving her a calculator this early, but if she truly will never internalize those facts, what am I to do?  How are we to progress?  She gets so mad at herself for not remembering her facts, and hates to have to use the blocks for almost every problem.

 

Help?  Commiseration?  What worked with your dyslexic?

[OneStepAtATime]

I completely sympathize.  My daughter is 13, dyslexic and struggled horribly with retaining basic math facts.  Thanks to wonderful suggestions on this board pretty recently, I finally did with mathematics what we did with remediation for the reading and spelling dyslexia issues and that is take everything back to the most basic levels and start over.  We are using the Ronit Bird books on math remediation for dyscalculia, paired with a British program called Dynamo Math.  You wouldn't necessarily need both and there are other programs out there that work on subitization skills, which is really what your child may be missing.  This may not be an easy journey or a quick fix, but it really has helped my daughter to start over with very basic math activities to finally help her see all the patterns in math.  Rote memorization never helped my child and if she was away from the math process for any length of time it was lost to her.  Taking a new approach, from a more basic level, is finally helping her move forward again.

 

Read up on subitization skills, dyscalculia, and look at the Ronit Bird books for additional info on math struggles, and if you want to know more specifics about Dynamo Math, let me know...The British are actually quite a bit ahead of us in research on math issues.

 

Sorry this is so difficult.  You are not alone.  Big hugs to you both!

[Heathermomster]

Maybe look at using 10 tray activities to teach addition and subtraction facts to 20.

 

As OneStep mentioned, Ronit Bird has written many excellent books. RB has her own website and sells an e-book called Exploring Numbers Through Dot Patterns that seems very good.

 

I found the book How the Brain Learms Mathematics by Sousa to be extremely helpful, very easy to read, and the text provides useful teaching advice.

 

Over the years, I have learned that DS must be taught slowly, in shorter time increments, and he requires constant review of previously learned concepts. For review of facts, maybe have your DD spend 5 or so minutes at MUS's online drill page as a warm-up exercise. Blessings, h

[SandyKC]

Two thoughts.. Reflex Math or TouchMath..  Both can help the facts stick.  The ReflexMath is great for daily practice to help the math facts "stick" and TouchMath is focused on the tactile multisensory learning, which is often what is needed when kids have difficulty retaining from MUS.

[TravelingChris]

My dd is very good at math but horrible at memorization.  She doesn't have her arithmetic facts memorized and it doesn't really matter.  She is now almost 17 and does have some issues in math that we are still working on like having her either memorize certain procedures or quickly think about how to figure some stuff out.  But those don't involve math facts and she has memorized most of them, just not all of them.  I found it was much more useful to just keep on teaching new math skills if she had mastered the previous one- like understanding addition meant learning subtraction, not memorizing addition tables meant learning subtraction.