My daughter (just started 2nd grade) keeps getting matched with great teachers. This one has already noticed that my daughter has trouble repeatedly writing spelling words out as spelling practice exercise and modified the exercise for her, which is great because she actually can't write and focus on spelling at the same time. She learns spelling by singing the letters to herself and then taking a practice test. All the other stuff is just very frustrating busy work that reinforces bad handwriting habits. I include this info to illustrate that teacher notices the issue and to say that the teacher is open to sensible modifications. My daughter should be getting a 504 in a month or two anyway (we are still doing testing--right now it just seems to look like dyspraxia-related processing speed issues) and the expectation is to get her accommodations for disorder of written expression.

But now she's coming home telling that math is really, really hard. How can second grade math be hard? She seems to be having two problems.

1) They are doing addition of numbers like 23 +2 like this:

Step one: Decompose 23 into 20+3 by creating circles coming down from the 23 and writing the 20 in the first one and 3 in the second.
Step 2: write out 3+2=5
Step 3: write out 20+ 5=25
Step 4: write out 23+5=25

Obviously, she doesn't need to write anything down to know that 23+2=25, and I've heard the complaint that kids get bored writing all of this stuff out, but I don't think that is mine's problem.

The more I watch her, the more I see how absolutely terrible she is at breaking things down into steps. I think I can drill her on this and that if she just practices these steps, she'll have them down. Is that the right thing to do here or is there something cognitive that she's missing that she needs to be able to do, that me drilling her in the algorithm will render ineffective? Or is it like the spelling, just a totally ineffective way for her to solve a problem?

It also looks like she's having trouble drawing circles and fitting the numbers inside of them and she doesn't like to write down the equation. When I force her to, she'll write 3 2 5. Then I'll tell her she left out the equation symbols and she'll force them in between the numbers while being very frustrated.

Is this normal? Are there modifications or ways of teaching this that will make it easier for her to write the steps down? I hate to have her hate math because of something like this. (FWIW, she is not math gifted, but she is working above grade level and generally scores in the 99th percentile on school math achievement tests.)

The other problem is even weirder, and it is something that I am starting to be able to trace back as a consistent problem. She is sometimes given a number (like 26) and told to show this number 4 different ways (2 dimes/6 pennies, 20+6, XXVI, etc.) She is really stressed out about this.

Whaaaa?

She told me that there are so many ways to break 26 down that there are just too many choices in her head and she doesn't know which ones to pick and gets stressed out and can't think. I remember when she was in a montessori preK, the one problem she had was in choosing what activity to do. She said there were so many choices that she couldn't decide. And if you ask her a very general question, like "what did you do today?" she says she doesn't really remember. At the school open house, they had to write down one thing they wanted to know about second grade and she couldn't think of anything. She said that she just did first grade for a whole year, why would she have questions? That being said, it's totally a blank page thing. Other than that, she seems to be a REALLY flexible thinker.

Getting back to the second math issue, I don't know what to tell her except for to just pick one thing out of the air and write it down. It doesn't matter which of the 26 ways she chooses. They are all the same, just choose one. I totally don't understand why this is so hard.

Does anyone know a way to help her through this problem?

We're with the perfect teacher and perfect place/time to ask for accommodations. However, I'd personally prefer she learn how to handle and solve her own learning challenges without accommodation, when possible.