So by way of background - I have an HG daughter age 7. Interested in providing her some enrichment, we enrolled her in EPGY from the age of 4 until she could start K at 5. She was able to complete through the end of 3rd grade on EPGY before starting kindy. We enrolled her in a local school for gifted kids where she has been going for the past two years. I did not do any enrichment at home with her because she seemed happy and challenged at school. Spending time with her over the summer, I became a bit concerned because I noticed that she did not seem to have a solid grasp on her math facts. (I know that she school is very "anti-math facts" and all about "math concepts". Concerned for her math welfare : ) I re-enrolled her in EPGY and had to keep moving down the level because it was too hard, until we got to level 2.2. Wow. What the heck has she been doing for the past 2 years? Now somewhat panicked, I brought her down to the local Kumon center thinking I could at least get a free test and get to the root of the problem. She tested at first grade level. WTH? This is a kid who could tell time at three years old. On the placement test she got all of the questions right except for one silly mistake, but she took too much time. (I believe, because she still sometimes uses her fingers). So my knee jerk reaction is to enroll her in Kumon and bludgeon her with math facts (seems to be the modus operandi there) until school starts. Thoughts?

(disastrous edit with no reversal option-- deleting)

Take my advice with a grain of salt, but fwiw I don't think I'd worry about it right now. Some kids just aren't ready (maturity) to have math facts down and quickly until they are older - there's a wide variation of when math facts "click" with each individual child. It's important to have a good grasp on them before a child starts in on algebra etc at the middle/high school level, but your dd isn't there quite yet. I'm not familiar with EPGY course content because we haven't enrolled our kids in EPGY - but if she's been in a school program that doesn't emphasize math facts and she's continuing in the program next year and she's doing well in the program... I wouldn't think there's any need to panic over math facts.

I have one dd who is enrolled in Kumon, and this is just my impression but fwiw - Kumon (our experience) has been that they start off with math facts drilling to get the child in the habit of doing daily math work with something they can show quick progress at and feel successful about. Our dd also tested at least one grade level below where we feel she's really at (at Kumon) and I think we have a fairly good understanding of where she's at re math from the work she's been doing in school. The cynical side of me suspects that there might be a business incentive to say a child is slightly below the grade level they are really working at in math in order to sell a few more lessons

polarbear

Seven is still very young to have the math facts down. We did not do the Kumon Center- it seemed so boring... However, I have my kids do one page a day out of a Kumon book (multiplication, addition, etc). It has really helped with the math facts alot.
I also made (or obviously you can buy) some flashcards. When my older one was 7/8, I would flip them every night for 5 minutes. He has a documented processing disorder and has extended time written into his IEP, but we have never used that.
He's really good at math, and he has the math facts down well. I would not pay too much to the Kumon testing they did- who knows if it's accurate, and maybe it's biased to get you to sign up for their classes. My older one in third grade got an 87th percentile on the (5th grade) CTY math part.
So just work on math facts at home a bit, Kumon worksheets and/or old-fashioned flashcards and that should be enough!

We do ALOHA mental math. http://www.aloha-usa.com/ DS6 now likes it. He is getting challenged at his level. Although it wasn't love at first sight, in fact he struggled.
We like it too especially now it's summer break.

Thanks all. It does seem like a bit of drilling might be in order here. I was just at the supermarket and I looked at a few math workbooks and it does seem like, concepetually, she is in good shape. She can borrow and carry, add, subtract and multiply fractions, she even can do order of operations problems - no problem.... but if any of those things involve needing to do something like 8+5... out come the fingers... and I actually think she seems to know her multiplication tables better than addition and subtraction - I guess perhaps she must have skipped over that part because she came in to school seeming to know it.

So just hunker down and spend some time with flashcards. It's boring but it has to be done!
When I was a kid, we did multiplication tables in school but they never do that in school today. I guess the teacher just expects that magically they will know the math facts.
I do think it's very important though. Even if your child is a wiz at math, if they still in higher grades are counting on their fingers, it will hold them back in Algebra and beyond. ALOT of kids in my son's third grade class last year did that!

I think it really depends on your daughter and what she wants to do. At 7, I expect she'll have an opinion, if you discuss your concerns, and that's what I'd do. I don't think there's any harm in "drilling" if she's willing, but I also don't think it's essential, if she's making conceptual progress.

FWIW, maths facts weren't fashionable when I was at school and I never learned them. I have as much maths as you like (PhD etc.) but I noticed when DS's school was wanting him to learn maths facts that for many of them I didn't, actually, retrieve them from memory exactly. What I did was to work them out at lightening speed (I could answer as quickly as someone who'd memorised them and didn't have any sensation of cognitive load), along tracks so well-worn that you might say I'd memorised the fastest way to work out the fact! I think I had just gone through a process of working out the same small sum over and over again, as part of larger problems etc., until I could do it that fast. I had and have never found this to be a problem.

DS, otoh, goes to a school that does value maths facts. It set practising "the story of 12" etc. as homework, and we did it (e.g. played ping pong on the bus - with the child, you speak alternate words and it goes, e.g., Ping Pong 7 5 6 6 10 2... - you give a number and the child has to give the number that adds to it to make the target number - phrased that way, not as subtraction! The aim is to keep a fast rhythm like ping pong. (And then you swap, of course :-) ) ) because he enjoyed it, but it wasn't something I felt particularly committed to. He did learn his tables early, using Timez Attack. I had explained when I installed it that I thought it would be a good idea for him to learn his tables because school would find it easier to believe that it was OK to give him harder maths if he knew them well. That he learned them so fast and well was because he liked TA though!

Yes ColinsMum, you are right she does have an opinion and the opinion is that she absolutely does not want to do math over summer break. Do you think it is a problem that she does not know something like, 12-8 by rote? I don't know... she is ahead of the curve conceptually (which I guess should not surprise me since that is, in fact, what they emphasize at her school). I guess I just worry that as the concepts get harder things will get exponentially harder without a solid grasp on basic arithmetic.
Yesterday I made her do 30 minutes of math and 30 minutes of piano practice, which makes me either the best mom ever or the worst mom ever - depending on your perspective.

My DD7 is just like this... a whiz at math concepts and still counting on her fingers. Whenever I watch this behavior, I get the impression that I'm watching perfectionism at work. She doubts her brain, and trusts her fingers.

She's got a point, too. Even at the pre-calculus level, I'd often have a complicated problem undone because of a boneheadedly simple miscalculation.

I was poking around in Aimee Yermish's blog the other day, and she had the story of a kid who couldn't memorize the quadratic formula no matter how hard he tried (due to 2e issues), but could derive it in 30 seconds - so the first 30 seconds of a test he'd spend working it out, and then be fine.

Short answer:

solid grasp on basic arithmetic =/= rote recall of maths facts!

Longer answer:

I'd say it depends how long she takes to work it out. If she is laboriously counting on her fingers and it's taking her half a minute to get to an answer, that's a problem. If she's getting the answer in, say, 5 seconds, then even if there are fingers involved, at her age I'd say that's not a problem, and provided she has good conceptual understanding and enjoys maths I'd be happy to assume that greater speed will come.

There are loads of computer games, and indeed board games, that require arithmetic and where you do better the faster you are. Why not pick a few that are acceptable to you and that you think she'll like, and require her to play computer games for 30 mins every day, if that'd go down better? My DS loves some of the games at http://www.mangahigh.com for example, e.g., Sigma Prime, where you shoot prime numbers at incoming composite numbers to factorise them.

Thanks - I'll try that or some of the resources on the other page. She can get to the answer very quickly and fairly accurately using the finger method. This is easy when it is a straight forward calculation, 11-4, for example. On EPGY it asks questions like 11-x=7, solve for x. They never teach any algebra at this level, so I think she is just supposed to know that x=4 because she knows that math fact. She was unable to move forward in the program because I have not taught her the algebra and she does not know this as a math fact. The other problem calculation she had the other day was as follows:

"Mom, how much time do I have to read tonight?"
"Well it is 7:46 and it is lights out at 8:00, you tell me"

I was really surprised that she could not figure that out.

I've been mentioning this on all the math threads but only because I love it so much. Bedtime math . Com. Sign up for the email they send you a new word problem every day and that's the only thing they send you.

www.flashmaster.com

I haven't used EPGY, but let me stick my neck out and say that if they are expecting people to be able to do that just because they recognise 11, 4 and 7 as going together, that's really terrible pedagogy (e.g., it might lead to the same child solving 7-x=11 wrongly by the same method!). I bet that's not what they intend. Seems more likely that your DD didn't properly understand the question - is that possible?

We used to play "secret number game", which goes "The secret number is called x, and the clue is that 11-x=7", which DS used to love from very young.

Algebra is easy, but something does have to be done to explain what that label x means.

Many children at this age don't really understand digital time. Could she have counted up minute by minute, 7:47,....7:59,8:00, or would she have gone on 7:60,7:61 etc.? I forget at what age, but I remember being surprised by my (very mathy) DS doing the latter at some point.

my two cents: my DD6 is similar to your daughter. A whiz at math concepts and tested at third grade in that area while four years old, but was never a math facts wizard. She also learned to read with no apparent effort so I think it was just surprising that she actually had to put in effort to learn. Math facts was this Achilles heel. I used to be anti flashcards, but for math facts, they seem to have their place. We don't do them that often. I intend to, but it just doesn't happen. The reason I finally approached it that way was because I was afraid that her upcoming first grade teacher might judge her ability based on math fact automaticity over conceptual ability and I didn't want that to hold her back. I was never that gifted at math facts and was not drilled with them either (I wish I had been) but I was accelerated in math eventually and on a math team so it didn't seem to hold me back. I see the same pattern in my daughter: most gifted in verbal areas, strong in pattern recognition etc. but not as strong in math facts. My solution is to try to help bring that one weak area up to the level of everything else. It is frustrating and boring though (for mom and daughter) to do flashcardss. My daughter doesn't do much on the computer, doesn't use an I-pad or any video games but I know some people use those for learning math facts. Hang in there. My daughter is getting better and better at math facts from repeated exposure. I think we are just not used to our gifted kids needing repetition and practice so this seems to be a big issue when even their weak spot is still beyond grade level.

mom123, we haven't ever used EPGY so please take what I say with a grain of salt... but fwiw based on our kids' school experience in early elementary:


When my kids first had problems like this appear in math, it wasn't with the idea that they should just "know" the answer because it was a math fact, it was the beginning of teaching the children the concept of how to solve for an unknown, and it was introduced before timed drills in math facts.


FWIW, only one of my three kids really had the concept of adding time like this take hold easily. I was equally surprised and really don't know why! Sometimes I wonder though if it's possibly related to living in a world of digital clocks?

polarbear

I think maybe turning time into anything else, e.g. angle or numbers, just is fundamentally a hard concept for some (many? most?) people. My DS took a surprisingly long time to learn to read an analogue clock face reliably, and I might blame it on digital clocks, if it weren't for the fact that my only memory of finding anything hard in the first few years of school involved page after page of clock faces to interpret!

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that preschool children can be taught and gain a lot of knowledge in specific areas and that this knowlege easily disappears a couple of years down the road when the focus has been shifted to something else. The examples were mostly in the domain of history and science.

I actually would not be overly concerned with the math facts as those should improve with normal practice unless your DD has a processing or memory issue. It is more disheartening that she lost almost two years of math concepts, especailly at the early elementary levels where the concepts tend to be intuitive. I would have her work in EPGY from her current level and you may be reassured when you see how quickly she leaps past the second and third grade work.

The only time that I have witnessed a noticeable drop in math ablity was in a child with mild autistic symptoms who displayed almost savant type math abilities at a young age and those abilities disappeared when the autistic symptoms improved substantially.

I have seen this with both my children. They had obsessions as two and three year olds which involved huge masses of memorised data. Within six months of moving on to other things they'd forgotten most of the information associated with the obsession.

I thought it was just me who did that. Now I know where she gets it from. Working on math facts. My husband dusted off his "little professor" math toy that he had from childhood. Apparently, he and the "little professor" spent a lot of quality time together. Unfortunately, dd does not seem to find the same appeal.

My ds5 is math crazy, so we've been doing math workbooks forever (he is odd - loves workbooks) . I'm pretty sure the 1st grade level books all had simple algebra in them. I just assumed that was common. He conceptualized algebra on his own at 4 but still hasn't totally wrapped his mind around time. I know it's the 60 minute=1 hour that throws him off. My ds also hasn't memorized any facts but quickly calculates. Yesterday it was "4+4+4 is almost like 5+5+5-3 so that means 4×3 is 12". Though I was impressed, I reminded him that just knowing 4×3=12 would be quicker.

My kids are odd too ;-)

I think G&T kids have more fun with quick calculations. Memorizing things is boring! I'm the same way (although when I was a kid, I was the kind of G&T where things just stuck in my head after I'd heard them once... I used to astound my parents, lol). Anyway. My kids are math monsters (DD9 is in the gifted math program at school), and they're not keen on facts either.

DS8 was doing negative numbers and fractions at 6, and now still struggles with memorized stuff. DD9 was adding, subtracting and multiplying at 3, and is only now just memorizing facts. My kids love the conceptual and are really put off by anything that's repetitive and bland.

I used to say the same thing "it would be faster to just remember, rather than recalculate" (such a simple concept - you think they'd get it, lol). Now I've let it be (for now, anyway - we'll see how they progress). Math facts are important, but my two kids are incredibly stubborn - sometimes it's easier and more effective to let them come to their own conclusions. My daughter seems to have finally decided that it's quicker to memorize, and so now she's doing it on her own. DS8 will come to this conclusion as well - likely faster on his own than if I get on his case too much.

I think you're right about the calculations being fun. My son tells time by counting fives from 12 though he has known the hand placement for o'clock, half -past, and quarter-til since he was little. One time he described how he had a computer screen in his brain where he can see the numbers turn different colors when he adds them, and I think he described some sort of imagined abacus. I'm a hugely visual learner, so I related it to seeing words in pictures before I learned to read ( I always saw Tennessee as two tennis rackets crossed and Kansas as the female version of John Denver)...I'm odd, too!

I think it's in large part that telling time is often taught poorly. Such time problems are no more inherently difficult than adding or subtracting with borrowing, or adding and subtracting measurements with conversion-- in fact those are all different forms of the same general types of operations, just with different terminology and types of "place value".

Have to give you a big thank you Tex - DS6 loves bedtime math - might be because we are using it to keep writing going over the summer and he views it as less writing but actually I think it's the giving of interesting story and facts alongside the math. DS is very good a setting up the equation from the word problems but slow with the facts, so I am just encouraging him - can you do it in your head, or do you need your fingers. It's also showing me what slows him down - like 9+3, he will start counting from the 3 rather than the 9. And he loves loves loves the 3 levels, he does the wee ones in his head, works on the little kids, and then he and i work together on their kids - great rec!

DeHe

I love the concept of the bedtime math which was that we read every day so reading is normal and fun. We can teach little kids math the same way. They say you have to memorize your math facts. Hearing/saying them in random order from the word problems every day should make them stick as good as any other way. Another thing we use is the khan math lectures on you tube. Type khan academy basic multiplication or addition 2 or partial quotient division. They're all good and only about 10-12 minutes. I tell my son to watch one math lecture then he can pick a kid show, which on YouTube is and hour long Mickey mouse clubhouse or something. I don't limit his screen time but I do limit his use of my iPhone. He can tell me some of the things from the videos in other contexts, like something came up when were eating cookies the other night about breaking three cookies into quarters how many friends could he share. And what if a friend gave a half of their piece. His out of the blue questions, so I guess some of it's sticking. And he counts 3 TIMES TABLE MULTIPLICATION SONG - FROM "THE NUMBEARS MULTIPLY!" and count by fives by schoolhouse rock, both on YouTube, as regular entertainment.

Is the fact that you think it isn't hard the only reason why you reckon it's being taught badly, Iucounu, or do you have other evidence of this? (Actually - what does it mean, anyway? If most people find X harder than Y, but a few don't, what is the difference between "X is often taught badly" and "X is occasionally taught fantastically"? Where does the norm come from?)

Personally I find it natural that children find time hard to learn, because, even though it is "just" another kind of place value, it's a different one from the one they're used to (and their first experience of the existence of bases other than 10) and it's one that is not supported by the number terminology and notation we use. If we had 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, I venture to suggest children would find it easier to learn the basics of telling time. (No, I'm not suggesting we switch!)

No, of course not. Without trying to be combative, I think I've already given enough information to get the idea across.

If time arithmetic were taught more the way similar arithmetical concepts are taught, stressing the conversions between hours and minutes, for example by setting up borrowing/carrying problems with hours and minutes columns (this is also a decent way to show how to work some problems with conversions between greater and lesser units of measurement), it would probably be easy to understand in the same way for the large majority of children. It'd probably be easiest for most children to postpone learning the modular aspects of time until the basic conversions are understood.

Aside from the understanding of what's going on numerically, the analog clock face can be confusing if improperly taught too. I think this is mainly because the hours and minutes are overlaid on the same dial; I've seen poor teaching methods begin stressing things like skip-counting or multiplying by fives to calculate minutes too early. Introduce all of this before the numerical concepts are understood, and it's a recipe for confusion.*

(Most of the rest of small, relatively unimportant time skills could easily be taught after a foundation had been correctly laid-- hour fractions 'til and past, etc.-- and thus should be initially postponed. I haven't attempted to list all the time skills here, or my take on a correct scope and sequence.)

I'm not a teacher, but I do have some math tutoring experience, as well as having taught time to one of my own children. I also have seen a wide array of teaching materials, and have bought some of them. These are the bases of my opinion. I'm confident that I could teach time fairly quickly to any child who's not developmentally delayed, and who's been correctly taught enough prerequisite math.

* There are a number of truly marvelous ways to counteract such issues, which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Here's a sample time lesson plan that's miserably bad, in my opinion:
http://www.time-for-time.com/lesson1.htm

I found it by googling for "teaching time", and picking the first link that contained a lesson plan, which happened to be the second link in the search results, then clicking through to the first lesson plan for teachers. I don't want to exhaustively list all the problems with the sample lesson plan, but in my opinion the scattershot focus in the reinforcement activities would actually tend to be confusing as to the mathematics of telling and converting time, as I don't see a correct foundation being laid before all the fun games start to be played. This is the sort of tripe that's been fostered by the multiple intelligences idea and "learning styles" thinking in general. So much activity-based focus on the idea that the numbers one to twelve must be arranged in a circle, which might seem to be valuable foundational work to a teacher or parent, is really treating the children like idiots, at least if they know what a circle is and how to arrange numbers up to twelve in order. They will see these numbers arranged in a circle each time they encounter an analog clock face for the rest of their lives; it needs no reinforcement.

You may also want to check out check out the other lessons on the same site. I won't pick apart everything I see wrong with the sequence of concepts presented, or how each one is taught.

It might violate copyright for me to post samples of good and bad time-teaching from widely accepted curriculums or books, and in any event I don't tend to retain bad books (except for bad poetry). I'm guessing that if I went right now to local booksellers I could at least find numerous examples of workbooks that present time using confusing conceptual sequences or methods.

I would not worry too much. My daughter (now 15) thinks she doesn't know something and then presto - she has it. It never takes her too long to learn or relearn anything. It'll come.