Math help for dyslexic

I’ll let someone else address what your son needs to help learn math facts. There have been good suggestions ont his board before.

Mad Minute Math is timed for the sole purpose of helping the child increase his ability to automatically give a math fact answer. It’s kind of equivalent to practicing reading fluency. So it’s not timed to penalize him, it’s timed to help him increase his proficiency with math facts. Certainly he should have extended time on important math tests, though.

Janis

There are some on-line math games. www.funbrain.com is a good fun site to review multiplication tables.

I agree timed tests are hard for some students but they are all the rage again right now. You might ask around to see if other parents are unhappy with the timed tests in the classroom. Maybe this teacher can be helped to do it a different way.

what usually helps a lot is Math Facts the Fun Way at http://www.citycreek.com. This approach uses silly stories to give kids a “peg” on which to hang the math facts. Kids who have a hard time learning math facts other ways often learn very quickly with this method. The basic multiplication tutorial kit is what you would want to get, and probably also the division cards. I think this would run about $40 all in (includes book, workbook, multiplication story flash cards, and division story flash cards). The sped teacher at our school has switched to MFFW because it works so fast for so many children.

Once the facts are learned, then a drill program such as Quarter Mile Math (http://www.thequartermile.com) is helpful to develop speed and automaticity. It is a good idea to call or email the company for a demo disc first, to try out with your child. We used this program for 10 minutes a day (me keyboarding to save time) for 4 months to develop automaticity with math facts.

Mary

join the DyslexiaSupport list at http://www.groups.yahoo.com. If you run some searches on the archived messages, you should turn up information posts on such subjects as developmental vision delay, vision therapy, sound therapy, cognitive training, Phono-Graphix, etc. — which are often helpful in reducing the underlying deficits of dyslexia.

Mary

Mary,

I have to tell you the strangest thing happened today! I read your post about MFFW and looked up the site because my daughter needs help with addition and subtraction facts (I already ordered Learning Wrap-Ups set). I also have a student who was struggling this week with some multiplication. I actually still had the site still up on the monitor when I was moving some papers on my desk, and right there in front of me was a flyer about MFFW!!! I do not recall ever seeing it before, and that possibly may be because my main focus is reading and not math in my current position. But I immediately recognized the graphics since I had just seen it on the web-site! I’ll probably order it soon!

Janis

Order it! I have used the kit for teaching Multiplication facts for over five years and now all the third grade teachers in my building use the program. I use it with my LD kids and they learn quickly. I have students who learned the facts in 4th grade, and they are now in 6th grade. When I am drilling a younger student, one of the older kids will give them a “story” clue! They still remember the stories years later!
I use the workbooks, but only for the individual posters and fun pages to send home to share with family. But the reading books are a must! And the flashcards are a help also.

Thanks, Lynne! I did order the addition set yesterday and I’ll order multiplication next! I’m so glad to hear more good feedback!

Have you ever used Touch Math? I’ve seen that on here a lot, too.

Janis

I’m sure this “Math Facts the Fun Way” has helped a number of kids and I’m not going to say no to it, but honestly, if this had been presented to me as a student I would have gagged and turned completely off.

Some of us *like* logic and patterns and have a very hard time with dumb jokes and distractors.

Math *was* presented to me as stories, in a very very good form, a set of books called “Arithmetic We Need” which were *entirely* story and problem-solving based. But the stories were real-life based — buying food for the class party, making crafts, going on a trip, and so on. This made sense to me and I managed through elementary school.
I blossomed in high school when we got to algebra and geometry and logic.

I have always, since kindergarten, done very, very poorly with teachers who tried to amuse us into learning. I get both bored and nervous. And I have a very hard time finding the lesson in among all the sugar-coating, so I turn off and ignore it and have to go somewhere else to learn. Several other members of the family react the same way. A couple of the younger ones got entertained right into dropping out of school.

While you are making your lessons entertaining to help the kids with problems, please make sure you don’t turn off that good student sitting there waiting for something worthwhile to do.

I don’t think the point of MTFW is amusement necessarily- the stories actually function as mnemonics and are really effective for kids who need a more language oriented trigger for their memory. I am also one of those people who was very successful in geometry- and algebra made me gag. I always needed spatial cues- I didn’t “get” multiplication and couldn’t remember the facts at all until a teacher demonstrated arrays. All of a sudden it fell into place- my son learned them in third grade by listening to the fourth graders when he was supposed to be doing something else:). We are all different- anything that fires the circuits is okay with me…

Robin

You miss my point here — mnemonics are a *bad* idea for many of us; they fill up memory space and *distract* us from the facts. They also take up time and energy.

So I and many other people get bored — we could learn the fact an awful lot faster and better, and then do something creative with our time, without spending the time on the mnemonic — and we get nervous — we don’t understand which part of the lesson we are supposed to be attending to, the easy and crystal clear math fact, or the clear-as-mud illogical unrelated mnemonic which is what the teacher seems to be spending all her time and energy on.

When we do clue into the fact that the easy and crystal-clear pattern is the thing to remember, and the other half hour is just something she does for God only knows for what reason of her own, we shut down on listening. This is a bad habit because them we aren’t listening when a fact or a useful lesson does come down the pike, and we become even more socially isolated.

I have had very good results tutoring kids and class teaching in both reading and math by direct teaching — this is what you need to know, this is the kind of real-world situation it is good for, this is how it works, these are the steps you do, and this is the result and look! it makes sense. Most of my students do *better* when the distractors are removed.

I won’t so no never; if a kid simply can’t progress any other way, well, use whatever works. But for a general class, my experience is that you get a lot farther and get more real retention and transfer if you keep the work tied to the real world.

I understood what you meant- I only intended to agree really-that what works for one can be a resounding failure for someone else- I could not learn the way you do- but hopefully I could find a way to help a student like you- along with a student like the ones who need mnemonics who may wind up in the same group- learn. Occasionally I get too caught in the thought and am not clear with my explanation- didn’t mean to be confusing:)

Robin

Robin, I think what you wrote was very clear. While I had an easy time memorizing math facts as did my own kids, I’ve also tutored many a child who simply, no matter how hard they try, can’t get them down. With all due respect to Victoria - I agree with her that for most kids the direct way is the best way - there are some kids for whom mnemonics are all that work when it comes to math facts memorization. I’m going to look into that program myself for these kids.

Not offended, honest.

I just get worried when something is proposed for whole-class use — I ask if it is efficient or time-consuming, useful for most students or a small number, a central goal of teaching or a sidetrack.

A lot of elementary teachers and even some secondary teachers are drowning under an overload of information and programs and cute tricks, and one thing I do in tutoring is to clear the decks and get down to the central ideas of the subject; *most* students do better with the distractors and time-wasters gone. For those who just don’t get it, yes, anything that works.

When you look at school texts, analyzing a number of them — and math texts are among the worst offenders in this respect — there is a weird feeling that comes over you: this page is good, yes, this is interesting, OK, this could be fun … but where is all this going? How does it all hang together? What is the big picture? What is any of this good for? Why should I be bothered with yet another page of cute trivia? When you try to make sense out of the text and organize a curriculum, there is the “motherhood and apple pie” problem — of course kids should learn graphing, of course they should learn probability, of course they should learn to estimate, of course they should learn geometry — wait a minute, all of these topics are good, but what I have is a pile of unrelated trivia, not a curriculum. Most elementary teachers don’t have the education to do this analysis especially in math, so they simply follow the book, or even worse pick and choose worksheets that they have found amusing. So both the teachers and kids are drowning in the information overload but not getting anywhere. Because of this, I tend to stress nitty-gritty, direct teaching, and not adding yet another cute trick to the pile of poorly memorized mystical incantations that many students think is math.

Again, if you have a real problem that hasn’t responded to direct teaching, by all means use whatever does work. I would just recommend trying the simple and direct first.

Actually, Victoria, that’s why I love Montessori math so much. It’s a beautifully conceived and completely integrated and UNIFIED program. Elegant, as they say in math. Nothing gimmicky, but lots of manipulatives in the early years which are gradually weaned out as the student moves up through the program.

But even some of these kids have trouble learning math facts and it’s for this group that I’d want to look at a program that employs mnemonics.

I don’t know Montessori practices in detail. I have read Mrs. Montessori’s teacher’s guides and some other books about the system, and from the reading it certainly seems to make sense.

Of course the central idea of Montessori is supposed to be discovery. In particular in math I believe the kids are supposed to learn math facts from working with concrete models for a long time; the assumption is that if you do addition for months with Cuisenaire rods or blocks or whatever and you see 3 + 8 = 11 a hundred times it’s supposed to stick in your memory. For many kids I believe it does stick.

But there are thise of us (and I include myself in this number; I’m very good at math but have an extreme ordering problem and an easily mixed memory and am distractible) for whom absorbing facts out of the surroundings is not at all easy. We *need* and *like* pattern and structure.

I recommend strongly using patterned oral recitation along with concrete models to help those math facts stick. You learn the facts concretely, but you then recite the tables over and over in a patterned way in order to stick them in the memory. May be old-fashioned but it works in a huge number of cases. I posted some months ago a long and detailed outline of how to do this effectively. You can see if you can find this in the archives or I can try to find my copy.

Yes, timed multiplication tests are aimed at basic facts automaticity, which plagues learning disabled children(including dyslexics) for a variety of reasons. I would object to random timed tests. That is fact tests that are all multiplication facts, but there’s no rhyme or reason for how the test was constructed. For non-LD students this is no great challenge but a waste of time for LD kids and at worst punitive. Make sure that LD students (and why not regular ed students too?) are specifically taught basic fact “strategies” so that they have something to associate their memorization with beside the two numbers staring at them (e.g. 2 x 3). There are many patterns that can be taught that are extremely useful to the student’s development of number sense. There are many examples and activities in my book Math That Counts available through Curriculum Solutions.