I have been homeschooling my 8 year old son now for 3 years. When it comes to math he draws a blank. Although he has a wonderful memory with the written word, numbers are beyond him. (Example: He can’t remember 9+5, but he can recite the Lord’s Prayer in Latin) After researching on the internet, I have found that he has many signs of dyscalculia. I had never heard of this before. We have an appointment with the public school on Monday to have him tested for this. What I need to know is if there is any homeschool curriculum or techniques accessible that would help me teach him in a way that he would actually understand. His problems include but are not limited to: inability to memorize and retain simple addition and subtraction, very poor concept of time, no kind of strategic planning abilities or ability to remember rules to games, although he loves to play them.(ex: chess, remembering how pauns move and attack;red rover, played it for 45 minutes before his name was called and then he just walked to the other side and grabbed the other person’s hand. In other words, he had watched the game being played for 45 minutes and still didn’t get it. Needless to say he was very embarrassed and I felt horrible for him.), inability to grasp simple math concepts such as counting by 3’s to 36, finding which numbers are greater than or less than another number, and finding points such as a certain seat in a certain row in a theater. Anyway, if there is any help out there I would be very greatful. So far we have used base ten blocks, fingers, crayons, pennies, you name it. I have also tried making up manipulatives for different things like we got out an old computer monitor and said this is going to be a theater, and we put blocks in rows for the seats and I gave him tickets saying which seats to put the tickets on(seat 5, row 2) He started to understand, and was doing pretty well at the end, but he still had trouble remembering which side to start counting from, and when we tried something similar in his workbook, he still had a really hard time with it. It’s like if the format varies at all, it throws him. The other day we spent 5 hours on one page, front and back , in Horizons Math and he still didn’t complete it. I realize completion is not what we’re going for, but I just don’t know if I should go back and start at the basics and try to give him a more firm foundation in numbers, or if he’ll just forget it again, and how do you get a child who can’t grasp these things to learn. I’ve read, “well you have to start with what they’re good at and gradually get harder”, but what happens when they grasp one thing, but as soon as you begin talking or trying to explain another thing they totally go blank, like there is an unpenitrable wall there, like that’s their limit. If a child has no concept of time, how can it ever mean anything to them enough to learn how to read a clock? Or if a child can never get in his head exactly how much 36 is how can he ever learn how to round up to 40. How do you teach a child how to estimate or even what the word means? Aren’t these things that most children usually kind of pick up naturally along the way, what I mean is don’t you usually explain it and they gradually get it through practice? The more I explain or try to teach him tricks that I learned in school, the more confused he gets. Anyway, these are my woes, and I would appreciate any help anyone can give.
Well, it sounds like you are doing many of the right things.
If he loses it when you change things, maybe the way to start is not to change things for a while.
Modern math programs tend to jump around from topic to topic far too fast for anybody, much less for someone with difficulty.
I would first start out with one topic, say simple counting and base ten, writing numbers from 1 to 99. Then I would do exercises from three or four or more books and practice with our pennies just counting and writing numbers for weeks until he can read and write and model numbers very very well.
Then I would move into addition of single-digit numbers 0 plus 0 up to 9 plus 9 and do that for months, using several different books and workbooks and *only* doing the addition sections until he can do that very very very well. It would be nice if he could get the facts into his memory and I would try reciting the tables in order daily, but I would also use the pennies consistently. After a couple of months doing nothing but addition, then I would consider moving into subtraction, but presented as related to addition.
No guarantees but this would be a way to start.