LDs and how they effect Math

Yes, absolutely. A child with reading/writing LD’s can have problems with math. Basic math procedures generally require rote memorization which is usually accomplished through the use of drills. If the LD is such that it affects reading/writing, drills are easy. Math problems and reasoning will be more difficult because of the WORDS (it’s actually reading). Fourth grade is going to much more challenging so be sure and get that special tutoring your child will need.

What type of tutoring will he need.he does go to resource room now for writing and phonics and spelling and getting Ds in reg. classroom in reading.he most likely will get a F this 9 weeks in Math after getting straight As all year.He has been acting sick a lot lately because he does not like this math .today is the first day he stayed home however.

Yes, I definitely agree with MATS on one point but disagree on another. Fourth grade is where my son fell apart in math. Up until 4th, math was a strength. The warning sign was in the middle of 3rd when they began multiplication. I just figured we hit a bump in the road, math is his strength, it will be okay. But I was wrong. In hind-sight I would have made sure that math goals were included for the 4th grade IEP. I regret it now, he really could have used the help at the beginning of the year due to the warning signals in 3rd grade. I do disagree with the tutoring part. If this obstacle is due to his disability, it is my belief that it should be dealt with in school, during school hours, not after school. If your LD child is like most LD children, they are spent by the end of a school day. He should not have to do hours of EXTRA work (with a tutor after school) to learn what the rest of the class is learning during class time, while he is lost in class because he learns differently. It is up to the school to make sure that he understands that material his way, but you will have to make sure it is in his IEP to get that instruction. Good luck!

My son has been identified with a learning disability in written expression, and in the process of his testing was also identified as gifted in math. However, what he is gifted in is understanding of mathematical concepts, not computation. His dyslexic/dysgraphic tendencies make things like long division, multiplication, addition and subtraction very inaccurate. A calculator helps, but only if he types the numbers in the correct order. What he has to do is approach calcuations slowly. If he goes too fast (at his level of comprehension), he makes lots of mistakes. He can get through the homework fine, but timed tests are quite difficult. There are other tricks that can be used to keep columns in line, such as using large grid graph paper for problems.

Word problems were also very difficult for him, although with time, things are much better. Improving reading skills will help in understanding the math problems. We did (and still use) a tutor, and that’s the only reason my son has improved. (He’s in middle school.) I have found, at least on the middle school level, that the one period a day resource room help he receives is useless, while the tutor we have found is priceless. In fact, next year, we are removing my son from resource room because it is useless, although he will stay on an IEP and see the special ed teacher on a consultation basis.

We did not find that using a tutor (originally twice a week, and now every other week) tired my son out. In fact, he could see the gains he was making, and was very happy to go to his tutor. He started this in 5th grade (was not identified as LD until the beginning of 5th grade, although the signs were definitely there in 4th grade.) I wouldn’t let the school alone remediate with math problems (I’m not that confident in elementary schools’ ability to teach math to kids without learning disabilities, but that’s another issue.) However, you may find that a specific math tutor may not be very helpful. What you need is a tutor whose expertise is special needs kids. The tutor needs to understand that the difficulty is due to the reading/writing problems, and not specifically to understanding of math concepts.

Yes I plan on adding something for his IEP we have a meeting on tuesday with his teacher for next year.When he was tested by the school last year they did say there was a disability in math calculation but not reasoning along with reading comprehension,basic reading skills,written expression.Math has always been his strengh untill this year it did take him longer than the others in his class to get the times tables through 11.They havent gone any further.i am afraid next year with more complicated problems he will get confused.

It appears your immediate need is to get him to understand measurement and fractions to get through the remaining weeks of third grade. I’m guessing this has been taught somewhat abstractly, and your child needs hands on. Get a (12 inch) ruler and a yardstick with centimeters on one side. Have him measure his height in inches, feet, and inches, yard and inches. Have him do it in centimeters and meters too, if he needs that. (If you can’t find a meter stick with inches, feet, yard on the other side—you can fall back on a meter is a bit longer than a yard.) Have him measure a lot of things around the house this way. Then have him guess the measure and check what it actually is. For area, get 1 inch square tiles and have him form various sqaures and rectangles and count up the squares. Show him that’s the same as counting the number of squares on each side and multiplying. For volume, maybe you can get hold of one inch cubes and do the same sort of thing. He may also not have had sufficient exposure to real life fractions—you can do this with apples, oranges, pizza, etc. and the square tiles can be useful here too.

For word problems, I don’t know a good resource devoted to this—I think a workbook has been mentioned on the teaching math board, but I notice a recent question specifically on this has gone unanswered. A lot of texts don’t really teach word problems—they are just tacked onto the end of a chapter about whatever math operation was just learned. To compound the problem, often challenge questions are also asked that involve multiple steps. I like Saxon for word problems because they have a very step-by-step incemental approach. They are interwoven through all chapters. Buying just the Saxon (www.saxonpub.com) third grade workbook and working through just the word, fraction, and measurement problems in the summer would be a helpful approach, but perhaps someone could suggest an equally helpful workbook devoted to word problems. For fractions, apparently there is a new book by I believe Marilyn Burney that has been the subject of a couple of positive posts on the teaching math board—you can do a search for complete information.

You are very fortunate that your son enjoys going to the tutor on top of school. Like everything else all kids are different. I can understand your point about not leaving it up to the sped teachers to help, most of the time is wasted anyway. I guess my point (and the thing that makes me nuts) is that when we accept this (taking matters into our own hands with hiring tutors) instead of making the school do their job, the kids lose and are in a sense punished (making them sit through class when they don’t know whats going on) for learning differently. The sad situation of these children not being educated the way they need to be during school hours is wrong. And until we stop accepting this as acceptable it will never change. If it requires bringing your tutor (or a qualified instructor, not just an available aide) in during math period, that is what it takes for him to learn the math lesson being taught. Please remember that we have an IEP which stands for Individual Education Plan, which means the curriculum must be adapted INDIVIDUALLY to a disabled child’s needs. Not that he sits there during math, everyone else it getting it, but he’ll get the lesson again on Wednesday, after school with the tutor while everyone else is outside riding their bikes and playing basketball. If we are not going to make the proper adaptations for these kids then we might as well not go through all of the hassle of meeting, writing goals and maintaining the IEP. Without individual adaptations we are not helping this child, we are hiding him in the mainstream classroom and not holding the school accountable for his education. These situations remind of having a bad employee under your charge. You can’t count on her to do what needs to be done. But instead of telling her that she’s not doing her job, and insisting that she do her job, you pass the project to someone else; yet bad employee still gets paid and keeps giving a poor performance. In order to run a successful business (education included) you cannot maintain bad employees or bad systems for producing your product. You make changes, you become successful and believe it or not you will have a quality product.

Not meant to sound harsh or critical, this is the subject that gets me going. We need to demand that the PROPER AND APPROPRIATE teaching environment be provided to our children. We are paying for it, why not demand quality?

I have spent alot of money over the past 2 yrs. having my son tutored in reading. It has helped him but also been very hard on him and our family.

Lisa you are totally correct my son is tired when he gets home from school and needs a little down time. The tutor comes 2x a week shortly after he gets home for an hour each time. Then I get home he gets a short break while I make dinner then it is time for homework.

I tried demanding he get 1 on 1 reading help at school they wouldn’t do it because he is in sped and gets special help. No he does not get special help he is handed work papers, seat work all day, has a little group reading. The most help he gets from his program is from the speech teacher 2x a week she is wonderful.

To say our kids are being educationally disadvantaged is an understatement. I am disappointed, frustrated and worried sick for my son’s future.

Linda stated “…they have been working on measurement,volume,area,and fractions and he has failed it all he cant seem to grasp it like he has with other math facts.he makes mistakes even when a problem ask like “Which is about 100 meters (or yards) long ? and it is a multiple choice answere he pickes a pillow”.

Is it really that your son doesn’t grasp the concept, or that he can’t read the problem? In my son’s case, when he was in 4th grade, it was that he couldn’t read the problem. If someone else read him the question, he could then come up with an answer.

Fractions can be a difficult concept for young kids to grasp. One thing to try is using visual props. Cut up circles into halves, quarters, eighths and show how 2 segments of the circle cut into 8 pieces fits perfectly into 1 segment of the circle cut into 4 pieces (and assorted combinations like that.)

My LD son had problems with terminology with fractions (and later division). He would confuse what was divided by by what. It took a lot of drilling to understand whether one half was 1/2 or 2/1. He has an LD in visual processing and written expression, and certain math concepts do require a type of visualization that is very difficult for him. Estimation is also very hard for him (in that visualizing what’s big and what’s small was nearly impossible), which would make him miss problems like the example you gave.

If you can, work with your son on his math homework and try to see if you can figure out what is the obstacle to understanding. In our case, it took a lot of time working with my son until we figured out that reading comprehension was more the problem than understanding math concepts. We then had a clue what to work on to improve how he performed in math in school. It did work, he’s now mainstreamed and normally getting B’s in his classes that don’t involve lots of report writing.

Good luck. Unfortunately these things are going to fix themselves overnight. I would encourage you to find the right tutor for your son , and it may be that the school isn’t going to provide the right approach. I may be extremely cynical, but having fought with the school for both my LD son and my gifted daughter for years now, I have come to the conclusion that the schools are not going to provide the solutions. Out of school help (for my son) and enrichment (for my daughter) are what’s allowing us to survive the system. The IEP is a nice concept, but at least in our school district, it doesn’t seem anyone really knows how to teach these out-of-the-box kids effectively. To a large extent, each one is different, and each needs to figure out their own compensation methods. If you can find someone to help your son figure out how to compensate, he’ll do better. In our case, finding a tutor who herself is dyslexic was what helped the most. It may take several tries to find the right tutor…they need to click with your son to get the most out of the time devoted.

The anxiety of being afraid you don’t know the answer can be every bit a part of why he can’t do it. This barrier can be like a brick wall.
Trust me when I say it can be a huge part of the problem. We just don’t address this. But it is very real. My oldest was so fearful after being stuck in a reg ed math class in 5th grade,that he would cry and meltdown. It made no sense to him,I know this,I went through it.

I can remember having a math teacher in Hs. He had a thick accent,not only could I not understand what he was saying,the concepts made literally no sense what so ever.What a waste that year was..

After I met with his math teacher,the teacher stated he participates in class,he had no idea he was having trouble,my son told me,”mom I just acted like I know what I am doing”.Our kids are smart,they know they are lost. Math for me,was like going to another country,and not knowing the language.

My son,didn’t qualify for Math in his initial eval,so no one really paid any attention to it,including me. He was intially tested in 2nd grade. In 5th grade,guess what his grade level in math was? 2.5. He made .5 months of progress in 2 and a half years in school.

I basicly had no problem getting him help in math,resource room and on the IEP,by requesting a reevaluation. Once the scores were in it was obvious he needed the help. BUT

The only thing that helped my son was the day he stopped being anxious over math.

I could not have said it any better:-) You go mom..

My son says he still loves Math and Science only.he just seem to grasp the concepts the problems are read to him so I know it is not that he cant read them.Homework has been a bear the past few weeks.he gets confused on how to get the area ,volume etc. and confuses different sizes grams,liters ,lbs,etc.He says why should I learn this because most things have this written on them.However he does have problems sequencing things too as like in spelling he has all the letters in a word but all messed up.His resource room teacher feels he should be able to stay in the reg, room for one more year for both Math and reading but after that be in resourceroom for them to.I find more out Tuesday.The school has already said they dont think afterschool tutoring would be a wise idea because he works so hard while he is in school and they do reduce his homework because of this.

Our dyslexic son had major issues grasping even some of the basic math facts. Then he caught on, but was doing many of the functions upside down and in the wrong directions; very strange, because if you would have him talk his way thru how he figured, he had the computation (basic facts) correct. Then came the meltdown with public school. Next placement there was a kind lady who spent hours with him using manipulatives (I remember they called them lifesavers, plastic rings of sorts), and after a while, all of a sudden, it clicked.

Me, I use a calculator for almost all but the most basic of math matters, mostly to be certain the numbers are correct. I deal in the 3 dimensional world of building houses where geometry (I barely survived the school version) and other math theories are constantly put into action. It’s weird, can’t explain it all, but I work with guys who can put together structures that the engineers and architects cannot tell you how to do it. Go figure.

Andy

Yes my son does this stuff also but usally has the right answers but cant show his work.His teacher last year would mark them wrong untill I asked her why punish him if he at least showed his work on a few problems.he also never lables answers on word problems and they also get marked wrong but his numbered answew is correct for the majority of the time.

ahhh,jeez,there is that show your work thing again!!!

Many a dyslexic person has gotten screwed up simply by the directional crap the teacher MUST apparently make them go through. What is the purpose??

Why can’t teacher realize that for some kids they can not understand by virtue of the rows, up and down process,stuff??

OKay I feel better now,had to vent:-)