Math facts

Read the thread on Master the Code on the Teaching Reading bulletin board starting with where MaryMN and I start posting. I think I jst found the answer to what sounds like a very similiar problem.

My son, too, is diagnosed with word retrieval deficit. We can use flash cards forever…it doesn;t work. What does work is repetition of a graphic form. To work on multiplication facts this summer, we do one fact per day. (or every 2-3 days if it’s not working) (He’s been exposed last year during 3rd grade, but it didn’t “take”. )

Each day we read a math fact from “Times TAbles the Fun Way (City Creek Press 800.585.6059) a must have book and workbook. Then we write the math fact in as many creative multisensory ways that we can think of: big piece of paper we draw the picture (from the book) and the fact; we write the math fact (some with and some without answer) on the sliding glass door in kitchen (dry erase marker), on the mirror in his bathroom, with whipped cream on his dessert (or paper plate or piece of foil); in clay, in cookie dough; on the blackboard, big chalk on the sidewalk (huge numbers a foot high). And then throughout the day Dad and Mom will quiz only on that fact (we do mulitply and divide on the same fact). Now, after a week, I’ve made up a worksheet with just the 4 facts we have worked on (plus throw in a couple of 1x2 1x5 and some of the 2.3 2x4, that I know he knows. Hope this helps. Kathleen

at http://www.citycreek.com is what the other posters are referring to. This is a super approach that uses visualization and stories to teach the math facts. The stories give the children something to remember the facts with. The home tutoring kit for multiplication facts (book, workbook and flashcards) runs about $44, and for a little more you can get the division flashcards. You can also just buy the book, or book and workbook, and make your own flashcards.

Mary

On the state names and other things like it, give as much visual context as you can. Surround the thing he’s trying to memorize with experience.

The brain stores experiences much more easily than facts and when we can translate facts and names into experiences, memorization becomes unnecessary as the brain feeds the facts right into the experience storing part of the brain.

On the states, for example, get a puzzle map of America. Let him see it and hold the puzzle pieces while he reads and says their names. Have him close his eyes and feel the differences between Florida and teeny tiny Rhode Island and great big Texas.

The same as possible with math facts. Have him practice his math facts with things. With apples, with oranges, with paper clips. The kinesthetic reinforcement can never hurt and, as with the states, build an experience around it.

Good luck.

To visualize a multiplication fact, make (for example) two rows of four dots, then three rows of four, etc,. Draw this and count the dots **just as often** as you write out and recite the verbalization. The dots ARE the math fact; the verbalization (two times four is eight) is the *second-order* abstraction of that fact. This is a point that is lost on many people and is completely ignored by most of the (bad, ineffective) programs out there; the concrete objects, diagrams, graphs, etc. ARE the math; the verbalization is worse than useless if it is not tied to this reality. One of the reasons New Math is such a disaster is that people are, to use a Zen parable, looking at the pointing finger and not the moon.

If your child is a visualizer, and you can get him over the hump of learning basic arithmetic, you have a treat in store; decently taught, he can excel in high school and college at algebra and geometry and trigonometry, where the verbalizers collapse.