Victoria, I was rereading your post about how to teach math facts and wondered about the visual part. As I understand it, you say to make cards that have the fact at the bottom (3+1 = 4) and dots to represent the addends. It seems to me the child is only going to focus on the answer and not pay attention to the dots. Please clarify this for me.
Pat
?? My post answering this doesn’t seem to have hit the board.
The issue is called *teaching*, and that’s why *you* are important and you can’t be replaced by a videotape or a computer.
Your kid, left to his/her own devices, will focus on the strangest things! I met one kid who had been taught that it was important to end the lower-case a with a little curl. He focused so much on the curl that the round part shrank to invisibility while the curl grew and grew, and the thing looked a lot like a fishhook and nothing like the letter a. In math, kids will invent their own rules. Being only kids, they won’t be able to reinvent two thousand years of math development, by several civilizations and some geniuses, (duh) so their rules will be incomplete or inconsistent or often absolutely incorrect.
You can’t leave your kid to his own devices to learn; you have to teach him, and that’s why you are so important in this process. You go over the dots with him, counting the separate groups and all together. You go over the fact with him, saying the whole fact, question and answer, and having him say the whole thing. At first it is slow and he will not see the point and will want to do it the “quick way”, guessing or whatever. After he realizes that first his accuracy is increasing so he doesn’t have to waste so much time on corrections, and then his speed is increasing because he really knows the material, he will be more willing to go along with it. It’s a long-term process, no overnight miracles or magic wands, I fear.