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math fact craziness


Xahm
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I'm not sure what the point of this post is except to shake my head about the asynchronicity of these kids. My six year old zooms ahead in math concepts but still largely counts on her fingers. We've been working ahead in MEP and Beast but also having her play various little apps and computer games to practice math facts in a more fun way, which is working but slowly. Yesterday she was playing one for the first time and it turned out to include negative integers as well as positive. It asked questions like 5-(-4) and (-1+7). She got all of those right immediately, barely thinking! All we ever did with negative numbers was explain what they are on a number line, but she is faster at arithmetic if negative numbers are involved than with all positive numbers! These kids... 

On a probably related note, I've been having her do BA2B along with beginning MEP 3, mostly to slow her down. She strongly prefers MEP, saying Beast is too hard. She does it really quickly, though, when pushed to it. I think it's too easy and she doesn't like thinking about things that are that easy. She wants everything to be either immediately obvious or else a real challenge.

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If it makes you feel any better, I was the kid in AP Calculus, counting on my fingers during exams. Didn't hurt me any!

It wasn't until I as an adult (really, when teaching DS) that I got good at "combining 10s" in my head and doing mental math at all. (Mostly because he's really good at it, and I was trying to keep up ?)

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Mine who could do math with negative numbers quite early never has liked Art of Problem Solving materials, either.

I didn't push her to master her math facts because she was have fun with math, but I finally insisted, and probably should have sooner.

Our best years were when she did a combo of Singapore and competition math- so really two math classes. Beast Academy was just coming out, but she said it was harder than it needs to be. We tried again with Algebra, and she liked it, but didn't love it, so we went back to two maths- one "regular" and one "fun".

Her favorites have been the Murderous Math books, Numberphile, Vi Hart and some of the MathCounts books. There was an old series that is way OOP now, I think Time Life I Love Math books she liked at that age. DragonBox, Stuart Murphy books and others. We read Number Devil about that time, too.

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  • 2 weeks later...

DS has been trying to learn multiplication tables for almost a year. When we do flashcards, he knows most of them cold. When he's working with an actual math problem, he almost always reverts to skip counting. It's like he can only engage one mental process at a time.

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9 hours ago, JHLWTM said:

DS has been trying to learn multiplication tables for almost a year. When we do flashcards, he knows most of them cold. When he's working with an actual math problem, he almost always reverts to skip counting. It's like he can only engage one mental process at a time.

Maybe try some worksheets. https://www.dadsworksheets.com/worksheets/fact-family-math.html

Try to keep it more like a game with little rewards if you can for doing it daily or improving how many he gets right, but the act of seeing and writing helps more than just flashcards sometimes.

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On 8/18/2018 at 1:50 PM, Sammish said:

If it makes you feel any better, I was the kid in AP Calculus, counting on my fingers during exams. Didn't hurt me any!

It wasn't until I as an adult (really, when teaching DS) that I got good at "combining 10s" in my head and doing mental math at all. (Mostly because he's really good at it, and I was trying to keep up ?)

Yeah, there were a number of us like that in AP Calc, and we all did well, but it still makes me laugh to think of.

On 8/19/2018 at 12:37 PM, MamaSprout said:

Mine who could do math with negative numbers quite early never has liked Art of Problem Solving materials, either.

I didn't push her to master her math facts because she was have fun with math, but I finally insisted, and probably should have sooner.

Our best years were when she did a combo of Singapore and competition math- so really two math classes. Beast Academy was just coming out, but she said it was harder than it needs to be. We tried again with Algebra, and she liked it, but didn't love it, so we went back to two maths- one "regular" and one "fun".

Her favorites have been the Murderous Math books, Numberphile, Vi Hart and some of the MathCounts books. There was an old series that is way OOP now, I think Time Life I Love Math books she liked at that age. DragonBox, Stuart Murphy books and others. We read Number Devil about that time, too.

I'm hoping she'll like Murderous Math. I got the set, and they are waiting for her, but she's resistant to reading books without lots of pictures. I could do them as read-alouds, but I think they are kind of that level of rudeness that I'm okay with, but she'll have more fun reading on her own without me having to be mildly disapproving.

 

(I actually wrote this post a long while back, but I walked away without pressing "submit reply." I went back to it now, and found my comment had been saved!)

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I did a math curriculum called Professor B with dd who is now 20.  We both loved it and it encouraged counting on fingers.  My dd took it to a whole new level and had little movements that made sense to her which she was still doing when she was taking calculus.  Finger counting didn’t hurt her in the slightest even though the curriculum expected to students to give it up after they mastered their math facts. Btw, did has a math degree.  ? 

Edited by mumto2
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