It's slow, but I told my son - everytime you learn, but don't practice, you will forget. But the good news is that you will learn more easily next time, and hold on to it longer without practice, and each time you relearn, it will go in better.
I know it seems hopeless, but please don't be discouraged. Perhaps a 'time capsule' to be able to judge what can be done today and compare to 6 months from now.
I also think that sometimes a kids learns a wrong fact, and then has to foget it before he can learn the right one.
Maybe to go back a step to practice skip counting by 2s and don't work on 7*2 for a day or a week. It worries me that he doesn't have a 'seat of the pants' feeling for odd v. even numbers. Although 7 is so 'ultra-odd' that I wonder if he doesn't give 13 as the answer because 13 is another 'ultra-odd' number.
Is he better with 2*7?
I used to have messy writing as a kid. One of the reasons my Math sheets looked extra messy, is that I got the idea in my mind that an 8 should be twice as big as a 4 which should be twice as big as a 2. So basically, digits have personalities for me - the odd numbers vaugely male, and the even numbers vaugely female. I wonder if you DS has his own meanings of digits that are interfering with his learning of math facts.
Come to think of it, 7 and 13 should be related in some fashion!
Smiles,
Grinity
