I've been been partial homeschooling my DD (7yrs) for about 6 weeks now. We work primarily on math and literacy for 2 hrs a day together. We started the homeschooling because I felt she wasn't working at an appropriate level in literacy, nor at an appropriate speed and in the appropriate manner for math (ie the level was not necessarily wrong, so much as approach and pace).
A few weeks in I was commenting to DH, and probably here, that her conceptual ability was well ahead of her basic arithmetic/facts. However, watching her work and also being reminded by a recent post of HKs about WHY I wanted to home-school math in the first place, has me wondering if she's not so much struggling to learn math facts as completely confused about basic principles. One of the concerns I was trying to explain to her school was I felt like coming at a vast array of concrete representations of the same idea again and again and again was confusing her (ie "Didn't we just do this? So this must be new... So there must be some trick here... Ummm...."). They want the kids to "discover for themselves" "authentically" the meaning of every possible concrete representation of an idea, like it's new and amazing...
She's struggling incredibly with basic addition and subtraction and watching her I can't quite tell if she's
a) using multiple methods in a conflicting manner
b) suffering from a working memory or processing deficit (ie the method is fine but she keeps losing her place and miscounting). She does have ADHD, this is feasible BUT she is on medication, which does work, and her WMI on the SB5 was 140+ BEFORE medication....
Can anyone suggest the right approach to figuring out if this is a method problem or a maturity of mental math ability problem? I am assuming I would address fixing these causes differently.
While we are speaking of her IQ testing - quantitative reasoning was her weakest area on the SB5 (96th), the tester noted it was too early to tell if she had an actual relative weakness or simply hadn't developed the skills yet through lack of interest (she was 5.25yrs). She's not crazy out there in math by any stretch (holding her own whole grade skipped, but no more than that in math), but she should surely be well able to manage subtraction and addition within 20, or at least within 10.
