Hello From Singapore,
I don’t know if educators States-side know much about the Singapore school system or the rigors of Maths here, but take my word for it, it is pretty intense. We had thought that my daughter had a language development disability only, when she was about three and was able to get intervention and therapy at a special language school for her in Perth, Western Australia. When we moved to Singapore, she seemd able to cope until she went up to Primary 3 and the Maths got tougher. Since then, she has been having a disastrous time and is failing her Maths. So, I began to suspect that she must have a different learning disability, something that wasn’t just language development based. Reading up on dyskexia, I realise that she fits the profile. However, her language school had helped her with her reading and learning to spell well and so her problem was ‘masked’, until her problems with Maths surfaced and became very promiment. Her language grades are also dropping because things are becoming more complex.
I could do with some homeschooling/tutoring tips from teachers out there who have had mathematically weak dyslexia students. My daughter’s Maths’ syllabus this year covers:
1) whole no.s up to a million
2) four operations with whole no.s
3) approx. and estimation
4) factors and multiples
5) square and square roots
6) triangles
7) area and perimeter
8) volume
9) graphs
10) fractions
11) decimals
12)percentages
13) geometery
14) Averages
15) ratio and proprotion
Re: Dyslexia and Maths
Dyslexia means difficulty learning to read despite normal intelligence and normal opportunities. It has nothing to do with math (except that you have to be able to read word problems). There is a math disability called dyscalculia, but this is extremely rare and it doesn’t sound as if your daughter has it. However, having said all that, it *is* quite common for dyslexics to have difficulty memorizing math facts. This has nothing to do with the ability to grasp math concepts. There is a good article about this in the “LD in Depth” section of this website, under mathematics.
Many of us are know Singapore Math because we are using it to homeschool. (One of the curriculums is available from a distributor in the U.S.) My 11yo daughter is dyslexic, grasps math concepts fairly easily, but has extreme difficulty remembering math facts. What has helped her a lot is Quarter Mile Math software, which we use to supplement Singapore Math. We did QMM for 10 minutes a day every day for 4 months (with me keyboarding), and she now has all her basic math facts down very well. Website is http://www.thequartermile.com.
One thing you might want to check into is just how much her reading disability was remediated. Personally, I am suspicious if she can spell but her language grades are dropping. It sounds as if she may have been “remediated” without being taught how to decode. Children who do not learn decoding skills “hit the wall” in 3rd grade, when memory can no longer handle the increased vocabulary load. Has she had a recent evaluation by a speech and language pathologist? I would also recommend strongly that you get the book “Reading Reflex” by Carmen & Geoffrey McGuiness ($16 from Amazon). This book explains a lot about the subskills necessary for reading, and includes some tests you can administer yourself to see where your daughter is in terms of decoding skills.
Dyslexia is often caused by an underlying problem. Probably the two most common undiagnosed problems are CAPD (central auditory processing disorder) and developmental vision delays, both of which can interfere with math as well as reading. You can learn more about CAPD at http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/, and more about vision at http://www.visiontherapy.org, http://www.vision3d.com, and http://www.covd.org.
Most dyslexics respond favorably to cognitive training therapies, especially when underlying problems have delayed development of skills such as sequencing and short-term memory — which affect both reading and math. A good home-based cognitive training program is Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com). The book, video, and starter set of manipulatives comes to about $80 US. The program requires about 1/2-hour of one-on-one work with the child per day.
Mary
US Distributor of Singapore Math
Mary, Who is the distributor of Singapore Math in the US?
Do you know of any schools who use this in the regular classroom?
Thanks.
Re: US Distributor of Singapore Math
I buy mine from http://www.singaporemath.com. However, Sonlight (a Christian curriculum company) also sells it. Sonlight is in the process of developing answer books for some of the higher levels, has had quite a bit of discussion of Singapore on its forums, and offers a review on their website (which I think is http://www.sonlight.com).
There are half a dozen schools — in Maryland, I think — using Singapore experimentally for a gifted student program. There is an email list for this group at http://www.groups.yahoo.com. I think the name of that list is SingaporeGTA. There is another regular Singapore support list at that site, called SingaporeMath. If you do a search there just on Singapore, you may turn up other SM-related email lists.
Mary
Chances are she doesn’t understand the vocabulary of math. Many kids can go through the motions of “doing” math but they do not have an understanding of the why do I do this. Instead they find math to be a mixed up jumble of numbers and certain processes that make no sense whatsoever to them.
My daughter has a good head for numbers except she had been placed in remedial math because of her ADD and inattention to the details…This year she is in regular 7th grade math…she has been doing fairly well but as we have gotten into higher levels of math her deficits in language issue have become a hinderance…She is hearing impaired and of course she would have language issues…what she has told me is some of these concepts just doesn’t make sense, can you help me make sense of them?
I am a speech path grad student so I know about the language issues but I am not a mathematician…LOL I went to my daughter’t math teacher at the middle school and clued her in. Come to find out she was not the only kiddo who was struggling with least common multiples. My kiddo could do factor trees out the wazoo but she was getting least common multiple mixed up with greatest common factor.. And how the teacher was showing them to do the factor trees and find the numbers necessary to find the LCM was so confusing. She did mention that she has an intervention program for the kids which she hadn’t even used yet. We dug through that and sure enough there was an easier way to do the Least common multiples. I had some of the worksheets copied by the RSP teacher and I did about 6 of the problems with my daughter at home last night and finally she got it!
The key here is to analyze the mistakes your child is making, see if there is a pattern, my hunch is since she has language issues this may be the crux of the problem. It sure does take a lot of time however to work through these language issues. One more thing there is a book by Chinn and Ashcroft called Mathematics for Dyslexics that may help you..