Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Mvg thro EPGY math...what happens it gets hard?

This is a great question. I don't have the answers, but we are in the same place. DS5, since starting ixl 6 months ago has moved through over half of third grade. Recently, a plateau has been hit where he doesn't want to do any problems that require writing stuff down, multiple steps, or things that require more than a minute to think through. He has suddenly started saying he hates math, and that he is terrible at it. I don't want to completely back off, because I don't want him getting the idea, if he says he hates something he can just quit. But I do think I need to change approach for awhile. I REALLY like Portia's thinking of just going laterally for awhile - then when they are ready, it all just comes together. For us, I think this will take the form of doing less structured math - reading through math books (Murderous Maths, Number Devil, Life of Fred, code books...are there others?) and then keep working on the writing, so that longer problems don't seem so arduous. And even though it seems he has been stuck in the same place for awhile, I have seen improvement - his writing has come a long way, and he has had to fight through a few concepts (rounding and estimating was a really challenging idea for him - why would you do that?). I think the big problem is that when things have come so fast to them for so long, anything that takes longer than a snap of a finger all the sudden seems tortuous. And you really do need to wait to develop a little more patience, and a little more grit.

But as Portia said, going laterally is a great way to build strong foundations. Reading had the same structure. For a long time he could read anything, but his plateau was that he wouldn't try a chapter book. Once he found the confidence, the sky was the limit. In the meantime (between 3.5-5) where he did read any word shown him, and read tons (just not in the straight-through format of a chapter book)we went laterally without knowing it. He just had tons of books that were more atlas/dictionary/thesaurus type of layout - things that didn't have to be read sequentially. That built his ability to take off reading chapter books when he developmentally was ready.

The cool thing about this lateral learning, is that once they are ready to pass the hump, they just fly to the next hump. I guess it is cool - actually it is going to make teaching this kid difficult!