NinjaNoodle,
Reading your post is so like what we go through with our 10 year old son.
He blurts out ansers without thought and in extremely resistant to working out the problems using pen and paper or doing double checks. What we are learning is that around this age math becomes much more multiple step processes and that our son was so used to doing everything in his head but now he is having trouble keeping all the steps straight mentally. (ADD may be a cmponent. More evaluations this summer about that) The problem is that writing it down feels like he is following the car doing 5 MPH in the 55 zone. DS is also subject advanced in math. One other problem we discovered was that the volume of problems expected of DS was more than 2 times that expected of his age mates. This in effect was burning him out on math. His IEP for next year will limit the volume of work but increase the complexity (I Hope).
I definately second Aleks Math. Although DS is not enthralled about doing it, we used in the past to provide a challenge and are using it this summer to try to get DS used to writing his work and doing double checks so that that is an ingrained habit by next Fall.
Good luck!
