Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion How to debug/correct basic math problems

Hmmmmm.... maybe.


Honestly, manipulatives like this were of NO help to DD or myself either one. Truthfully, the manipulative was just, like-- well, one MORE thing to try to manage. It just didn't "map" mentally at all.

Even with an abacus-- I'd encourage free play and then use the CONCEPT to discuss a way of approaching the math, not necessarily mandate that she use it to work math. Does that make sense?

DD sounds exactly like this-- she's a purely phonetic reader, symbols she has ZERO trouble with, it's just a numbers thing for her. She seems to prefer the context and a MENTAL construct to work within, or it just doesn't stick. She's not quite so extreme that way as I am, but my DH is also this way to some extent. I have to have it in my head to use it. He can (sometimes) use what is on paper.

Seriously-- both of us got labeled "probably slow" because of arithmetic troubles in elementary school. Uhh- yeah, just, no. We both have terminal degrees in the physical sciences, in math-heavy disciplines.

My prediction is that people like this don't develop fluency until they NEED that fluency for some other purpose. If you place load on the skill, it will come.

I should have elaborated....I was given the cusinaire rods to play with in 5thgrade by my teacher. Everyone had an individual set. There were some activities and games but mostly free exploration to find patterns and discover with them. I actually made several connections to patterns that I had never noticed with just numbers or other manipulatives. I never had to use them for any particular assignment, they were just available.

My kids have a set here at the house and pattern blocks and a balance with gram cubes and fraction bars...all that stuff we have played with together and then I just let them explore it on their own.

YMMV

hee - that's funny! i started with money as a way IN to arithmetic with DD5. i think it really helped for her to see the connections between 1s/10s/100s so multi-digit addition/subtraction was a snap. i did have a hard time tracking down pennies since Canada recently retired the 1¢ piece, but it was really worth the trouble. fractions and multiplication/division have also been well served by money counting - oh, and analog clock problems worked, too! those have also been great for reinforcing number sense in a fun, visual way.

but i bet DD5 would enjoy some Sweet Shop Math even more!

My mom used to joke that I could solve any problem if it had a dollar sign in front of it.

I'll be curious to see how HK's experiment goes, but I wouldn't hesitate to give her pocket money to calculate purchases when you're out. The motivation of the purchase may be just enough "load" to induce full interest/effort if that's the weak link.

What's the square root of $1?

We don't have 5s. 9.95 should and usually is rounded down to 9.90, 9.99 to $10. But of course in maths. 1.55 is rounded to 1.6 (2 do).

I did a lot of work with DS in the early days with short cutting computation- we broke things up into manageable parts, we did a lot of mental math on car rides, we checked out the Sir Cumference book on how to organize to accurately count large numbers. The main "gist" was mental organization to compute quickly. I was a budget manager for years, so learned some skills (for most people, it is a skill) with quick calculations.
It does sound like she may need some help with "math facts" and tips for quick calculations. For instance, once I was sure that my son understood multiplication and struggled through a good deal of mutiplying on his fingers and counting groups on paper, I did successfully use flash cards and the iPad to facilitate memorizing the table (same with division).
Sometimes it takes a bit for things to click- I was like that as a kid with math- not always quick but when I got it, I got it better than most.

Better still if I'm short that much... (-$1)

Part of that is anything that I want it to be.

I like negative square roots and money. I'm going to build an island with my proceeds.

This sounds a lot like my DD, too. But she's really good at memorization and is begging for some "new big idea" math so I told her we would do a little push on math facts adding/subtracting 1-20 for a month (as folks have recommended here before). Rods have helped for sure. But she'll touch fingers and mutter and know and forget facts... And she definitely thrives on being shown approaches to problems instead of "discovering" (seriously the math at her school is going to be too much for me... But there are other kids in the same boat so I hope with a bit of math fact hot housing we can join up and ask for a real accelerated math group). Showing her column math and regrouping made things exciting enough for her to really want to work on facts. She's just aching for new ideas, challenge... She intuited negative numbers and certain patterns in graphs and fractions etc etc at an early age... But yeah those little facts!

Thanks everyone! I'll report back late next week I guess, we don homeschool Friday mornings, she just goes straight to school on Fridays. And obviously nothin is likely to happen instantly. But I think Monday I will goring out some blank number bond temates and get her to figure out ever number bond to 20, maybe not the ones 12-18 where one is over 10, because those are covered by knowing 1-10.