I am wondering if you all might be able to help me with an issue that may or may not be a g/t issue.
My dd14 is a creative and "bright child" (read never been tested); she is good natured and loves to write and sing and act and dance and read. She enjoys English, Social Studies and Science at school. But she doesn't like math. She started out in the advance math class in 5th grade, "stepped down" a level for 7th, and is "stepping down" another level for next year.
She is having (and in retrospect has always had) a lot of trouble with math calculation. She recently got a D on an Algebra 1 test; I had her sit down with a tutor to go over it and learn the material she hadn't understood. Well, the tutor told me that she understood everything perfectly. She verbally outlined each step to take and even finished the tutor's sentences for her. But she had made many many errors in computation.
Last night she was studying for a test. I sat down to help her with a section she was having trouble on. (She hadn't understood/heard one step of the process. Once I gave her the missing piece, the whole thing clicked no problem). But to graph the inequality she had to multiply and add some very easy numbers -- and she messed up. Twice. "two times three is six plus negative two is five".
I don't know if she can't hold the numbers in her head long enough to manipulate them, or if it's something else. She doesn't have a "number sense" it's not fluidly understood that subtracting is the same as adding a negative or that, like in the example above, an even number plus or minus an even number isn't going to be an odd number". I know she was taught these things. I don't know why she doesn't "have" them.
So I guess she is going to need more computational practice. Would anyone know of a (not too rote) way to practice these skills? Something online a teenager could fit in?
But also, if anyone has any intuition about what might be going on, I would appreciate your input. Can this be an ADD thing? memory? lack of interest?
Thanks for the help.
