My son is a seven year old visual learner with below average number sense.
I home school and have heard a lot about the works of Marilyn Burns and Grayson Wheatley. They both have published Math guides. I am wondering if anyone out there has used any of their books. Thanks!!
Re: Burns & Wheatley
Another good resource for students having difficulty with math concepts is the series produced by a Canadian company: Box Cars and One-Eyed Jacks. These books usually come with dice and cards and teach concepts such as place value, fractions, decimals and probability through various games. The main publisher is in Calgary although I am sure they have a website. (I don’t have my book at home with me right now). Check it out through Google and I’ll check back on this to see if you had any success. I’ll also track down the ISBN for the book.
I really like Marilyn Burns’ books but they do depend a lot on language. This is a good thing if your son has good verbal vs. poor spatial skills; it’s a bad thing if his problem is with connecting the symbols for the numbers to the concepts.
I don’t know about Grayson Wheatley.
Another good source for stuff-at-home is Peggy Kaye’s Math Games. Lots of them (like “math stories” ) are rather language based but many aren’t, and she explains a lot about how kids’ understanding of number concepts develop so you can take things a logical step at a time. Like reading, we often forget how we learned what is really easy for us — so we skip important concepts (like 12 is the same amount whether it is one row flat on the ground, or three rows of four — at early stages of development a person is absolutely certain one is much bigger than the other).