My DD who is 6 has a great perceptual reasoning score (147), yet has difficulty in math. She especially has a hard time memorizing math facts. I thought perceptual reasoning was related to math ability? Is her working memory (significantly lower at 107) possibly causing her difficulties? Should we have an evaluation of some sort done? Her math work is going to increase quite a bit when she starts 2nd grade next month and I'm worried.

Have you seen any other indications of possible LDs? For example, my DD has a similar PR score but she is dyslexic. Her conceptual math skills are very high and she is a couple years advanced in math. At the same time, she has a hard time with rote memorization tasks and timed tests so she is not great at math facts.

Check out the visual spatial section on www.gifteddevelopment.com

You might find something helpful there.

Memorizing math facts doesn't really have anything to do with math abilities.. just with memorization skills. My DS8 has a difficult time with short term memory, but has amazing long term memory recall... so, it's hard to get him to memorize things like math facts initially, but once he does memorize something, it's in there forever.

Math also require a lot of reading and writing skills, as well as organization... I'd look at the other areas to see which ones your kiddo needs some help with.

I don't have much knowledge about scoring tests, but I do know that my son who is 6-years-old scored in the 99.9th on his test, and he HATES memorizing things! Hates it! (He also hated memorizing spelling words last year in school.) He can multiply and divide by skip-counting, but he has yet to memorize his multiplication tables. He's learning them by singing songs now. Hopefully it will help him with the dreaded kill and drill!

Your DD is only 6, so she is still really young. You have lots of time work on math facts. Although I think it is boring, buying a few Kumon books and drilling through those are really good for math facts. And just buy or make some flashcards and flip through them daily, 5 minutes a day.
We did that for my older one, who has a processing disorder. We did flashcards (addition, subtraction, multiplication) 5 minutes a day for 6-12 months.
I had him do a few speed math tests- he got 49/50 for addition and subtraction and 45/50 for multiplication in two minutes. Not too bad! 1 1/2 years ago, he only got 14 in 2 minutes. So just chip away at it.

If your daughter has a hard time memorizing math facts, don't worry-- as others have said, it doesn't have much to do with her general math ability. That said, math facts are necessary good to learn at some point, to aid in fluency and allow proper focus on higher-level concepts when working problems. In addition, learning the facts may help in advocacy, as it removes a potential objection by the school to advancement. Maybe your daughter just hasn't had a method of learning math facts that clicked with her, or she might just need a little more time and practice.

I know that Timez Attack is used by some parents, whose children find it fun. We used IXL once upon a time, and something about the practice tasks there really clicked, to the point that my son was able to get the whole set of multiplication facts memorized after a few sessions (and normally he hates drill of any sort).

Some searching turned up these links, which may help:
http://letsplaymath.net/tag/times-table-series/

http://www.bigbrainz.com
http://mathrider.com
http://ixl.com
http://xtramath.org
http://www.mathblaster.com/

One technique that may work for your daughter is to give her strategies for (re)constructing the facts. Once she learns her twos table, she can construct the fours as long as she can add in her head, etc. I believe that that first link above has some strategies in it. Those might work well because they can increase confidence-- even if your daughter can't remember a fact, if she has a way or two to reconstruct it she won't be at a loss, just will take a bit more time to come up with the answer. In addition, if the reconstruction takes more time than simply memorizing the answer, over time she will simply start to remember to minimize the work; it will probably be automatic and relatively painless.

My two kids were the same. I think memorization is very dry and doesn't have the same appeal as calculating

This is what stymies my son. His computation abilities are well above grade level, but as soon as he has to read a word problem or show his work, he starts losing marks.

At DS8's 3rd grade parent/teacher conferences, the teacher commented that "obviously he has his math facts down". I explained to the teacher that I don't think he does, but he can add in his head very quickly. Whatever works at this point is fine by me.

I think so too... The important thing is that they're getting the answers right and building skills. I think once the math becomes complex enough to make the adding in their heads too time consuming, they'll do the memorizing because it's faster that way. (I hope, anyway ;-) lol

Just joined today after a few months of browsing. This site is the first place I'd encountered the term "math facts." What a horrible idea, particularly for a gifted abstract thinker. Math Concepts and Processes? Yes. Facts? No.

An abstract thinker learns quickly by understanding and creating robust active connections. Drilling creates hazardous ruts and lays down the wrong pathways (being bored and hating is a survival instinct for the precious part of the brain that is trying to save itself from being mis-wired.)

With high perceptual reasoning, they should be drawn to the patterns. Help them discover patterns. Eventually they will have very fast paths to the answers, and when the numbers get larger they'll use the same processes just as quickly while those who had "math facts" hammered in will fumble with no learned process to back them up.

Er...Zen Scanner I never cared for "math facts" myself, and my school spent a lot of time on timed drills which were of little benefit to me. I have a very fast processing speed and working memory.

My DS8, however, has an average processing speed and working memory, and I see where not memorizing the multiplication table slows him down greatly and frustrates him.

I find so much at fault with your post that it's hard to know where to begin! Learning and teaching math facts is a fairly frequent topic on websites and in scholarly journals about education; your lack of knowledge of this is not evidence that the idea of math facts, or the learning of them, is educational nonsense. Increasing arithmetical fluency is not at odds with increasing conceptual knowledge; in fact it may reduce the cognitive load necessary to do the "grunt work" of a problem, and thus increase a student's ability to focus on the conceptual. And by increasing the speed of working a problem, it can give any student with speed issues, gifted or not, a better chance of keeping up in class.

Meanwhile, your own apparent strong focus on rote problem-solving procedures is at odds with becoming strong in math, in my opinion. Math-- taught correctly, and at its heart-- isn't about learning a set of steps that one then successfully applies to bigger and bigger numbers. There isn't enough room here to go into what math education is or should be about, and I'm less qualified to weigh in than many here, but it certainly isn't that.

Drilling in and of itself doesn't create "hazardous ruts", though it may bore someone who doesn't need the drill. There cannot be any math-fact-avoiding survival instinct, since cavepeople didn't have math facts to avoid, and if they did, avoiding them wouldn't have avoided death before procreation.

I don't know if it's an entirely bad thought; I do think there's something to being allowed to learn in the ways that make sense to an individual. Further I do think there is something detrimental in pushing speed of fact regurgitation to the point of freaking a kid out/paralyzing them into feeling like they know nothing. I don't think our schools are the only district where this is occuring.
I guess you'd have to have be a kid like this or have a kid like this to understand they're not just slacking off and not assume they WILL memorize the math facts one way or another. Sometimes...they WON'T.

But that certainly doesn't mean they can't do really well in math.

The idea that's entirely bad is that teaching math facts is entirely bad for gifted children. Anything can be done badly, or overdone. In any event even though some students may have trouble initially learning math facts, they are valuable for anyone to know.