And then there are the stealth kids, which I'm starting to realize my kid is one of. (What's the equivalent of stealth dyslexia, stealth innumeracy?)
For those following our summer math adventures, we started where school left off, doing 2nd grade math. Then I realized that struggling with her math facts was making 2-digit stuff unneccessarily hard, so we started memorizing addition with TimezAttack.
And THEN, just a couple of days ago, I tried her on DreamBox again just for a lark, and it's kind of amazing what it's revealing to me. It has her working on 1st and even K stuff, and it's like watching these little explosions go off in her brain. She says things like, "Now I know what eighteen LOOKS LIKE!" She's getting it for the first time WHY, for example, 9 + 2 = 11. It's not just a weird combination you memorize, or an answer you arrive at by doing a rote algorithm with your fingers. There's an actual REASON for it, that you can VISUALIZE.
So here's my kid, with her wacky visuo-spatial sense, heading into 2nd grade math with an entire year grade-skip because she's been compensating with her freakishly large verbal working memory.
I've completely revised our goals for the summer -- if we do nothing else besides DreamBox through 1st grade, and learn some math facts, so that she's not starting 2nd grade math on "wet cardboard," I shall be very well pleased.
