Dd is struggling with maths and it’s ruining school life.

[Mummysharkdoodoodoo]

Dd is 10 and has always struggled with Maths. Only recently she has learnt all her times tables. She’s scoring 3/4 out of 15 on tests etc. Most evenings she spends crying about it and how she just doesn’t understand it. I rang the school last week and they haven’t contacted me back. I’m going to chase it up today.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. She’s had a lot of help at school where they take her out and spend 1on1 time.

She’s fab at everything else but it’s just maths 😒

What about a tutor? DD went from really struggling to top of the class with a year of tutoring. It cost £20 for 45 mins weekly.

They should be doing some extra/intervention to help her fill in the gaps. Is there anyway they can tell you what things she needs to learn and you do a bit at home too if it upsets her lots?

It’s a vicious cycle - telling a child they’re bad at maths and creating a stress around it will make it worse.
Games and everyday maths are the way to go.
Baking - weighing, measuring, halving, cutting into six or eight.Talking about fractions whilst you do it.
Playing board games and card games - good for number bonds if you play pontoon using 13, 16, 12 etc instead of 21.
Singing the times tables in the car continuously.
Using Binka to sew counted cross stitch patterns.
Using younger than age work books from Waterstones to help ensure the ‘building blocks’ are in place.
Talk maths in everything - each car has four wheels how many wheels do you think are in this car park? How old added together are the children in our family? How old does that make mummy when she had Fred?
Make it fun - beads and threading are good. Make jewellery - repeat patterns, multiplication etc. If you got really good you could do simple sequences- you put the first three blocks of a sequence and she has to add next one. So you do green, red then green, green, red, red, then green, green, green, red red red etc. As she gets the hang of it the sequences can be made harder.
Do it so it doesn’t even feel like maths.
Does she play an instrument? Often helps maths too.

Do lots of mathematical type things bit without telling her it is maths.

Things like baking a cake together, get her to do the measuring. If the cake recipe is for a large cake how can you make it smaller to feed two people?

I love maths as an abstract, I have been known to do calculations just for fun. I find a lot of people who have a blank with maths are the type of people who find it easy once it is related to real life.

Is it one particular maths topic, or maths in general?
I would also get a tutor, there's a concept she hasn't grasped properly somewhere along the way, she needs someone to find the gap and fill it for her. Poor thing, no wonder she's frustrated.
In the meantime, can you use concrete objects to help her solve problems while doing homework. If she can actually see and manipulate the numbers then it makes the concepts less abstract. Buy a few packets of chocolate chips to use!

Mathletics is really good, or some of the workbooks and work through it with her. Mathletics you can start off setting to a lower year, build her confidence up. If you go through it with her it can be quickly apparent what issue is.

Both mine are very mathematical but DS is ASD and if there's an issue and I go through things with him its quickly obvious what the issue is. It's always English with him.

Have you tried the Khan Academy? Really helpful videos and online exercises, they make it into a game.

Stop the stress, if she only gets 3/15 then tell her your proud she has tried and you love her anyway. However, keep it light and ask her what she got wrong.

Go to school as she needs extra support.

Get a tutor.

Make it fun, there a books that you can buy, mine have them, where it's a mystery and they have to solve clues to solve the mystery and get through the book. Sometimes when maths is relatable it's much easier. So I would try that, mien don't think of it as maths, they enjoy them.

There's also 'Komodo maths' online which is for primary children. I'm thinking of trying it myself as it has good reviews and reasonably priced. I like Khan academy, as a free resource its amazing, but is geared towards American students.

Get a tutor. Best money we ever spent.

Where do I look for a private tutor? I think that would be the best way! X

Is it possible she could have dyscalculia?

Confidence is such a huge thing in maths. She's getting some right already and learning your tables by 10 is a significant achievement. It does sound like she can do it and may be much more capable than she thinks. She also sounds like the kind of child who would have been much more comfortable with the pre-Gove curriculum, which (by my limited experience) seemed to allow more time to manipulate objects and introduced building blocks a bit more slowly.

"Real" mathematicians don't do column addition or reciting times tables. They rarely even use numbers. They use logic, reasoning and creativity and I bet she has those by the bucket load. Numbers are arguably just a stage to get through in maths. A long stage, admittedly, and a lot of people don't go beyond, but even by A level it's not so much about the numbers. Believe in her as a "big picture" mathematician, do logic books, riddles etc to build her belief that she is a great deductive thinker. If she's doing well in science, history, reading comprehension then she is already doing it and you can tell her that! Treat number manipulation like you'd treat learning letter shapes in reading - total belief that she can do it, but just something to chug through and not indicative of being good or bad at the "big picture" of reading or doing maths.

I know you're after something more concrete, and you have other advice on that. I think a tutor might be a good idea. But the above has helped our Y7 finally believe she can do maths, and stop taking every wrong sum as abject failure & confirmation that she's rubbish.

Facebook seems to be a good place to look for recommendations? Otherwise school might have suggestions?

I had exactly this last year with my DD in year 6. Her teacher didn't expect her to meet extended standard in her SATS and could also see that she had started to really dread maths lessons.

I put a posting on my local area's forum on line (I think most places have them these days)?) and I got a number of responses. I was a bit at the cost per hour of a qualified tutor and thought I might only be able to afford a few lessons.

Then o got a response from a gap year student who was off to study maths at uni the following year. He was half the price and absolutely brilliant with her. She looked forward to his lessons which I never thought I would see.

It didn't matter that he wasn't qualified as there are so many on line resources and he had been taught in the same way that they teach in schools anyway.

Anyway I think there is nothing as good as a 1 on 1 tutor that they get on well with and feel comfortable asking them to repeat / explain concepts that the teacher only has time to explain once in class .

She passed her maths SATS no problem and her confidence in maths is now so much better.
Good luck !

Sounds like dyscalculia.

Are the tests mental maths or written? Ignore mental maths if she can't do things at speed.

Times tables are very useful but you can manage without knowing them well (as my DDs prove despite best attempts, they both have SpLD).

Visual physical aids help a lot. e.g. Money for column addition and subtraction. Pots and pennies for multiplying and dividing. Pizzas/cakes for fractions.

Work on core written skills & methods. No point trying to do harder stuff if she can't do easier stuff. No point trying to do mental stuff if she can't do it on paper.

Number lines are fantastic and work well for time based questions too.

If she knows her times tables she probably doesn't have dyscalcula

And by knowing I mean she knows the answer to what's 6 x 8? Quickly and without thinking. If she just knows the rote recitation of them then that's not really knowing them

If you happen to be in South Hants then message me.

I was also going to say dyscalculia. It's awful to deal with. You can learn but not retain. I can be taught how to times and divide with great difficulty but the next day not be able to do it. My brain just can't compute numbers. I managed division by picturing people sat around a table and having to share an amount of money evenly. It was a long and laborious process. A tutor might help but if she can't retain what she is being taught l would look into whether she may have dyscalculia.

Tutoring might be a way to go. My niece needed a private maths tutor for a while around that age and just graduated with top grades in Internal Architecture - very 'mathy!'

If she knows her times tables she probably doesn't have dyscalculIa

This is not true.

Can you get her some one to one help outside of school. I had similar at about 8 years old and I can remember not wanting to go to school. The maths coach put me back on track. We went back and re established the basics and she found out where I'd gone wrong/lost the way and we worked on those bits. I don't know what it cost but it was worth it. I think maybe it was just for a term or two.

As for finding a tutor, if you suspect dyscalculia then try the Patoss website. Or ask her school, lots of teachers/ex teachers do tutoring and the current school might know some. My DD (14) who has been diagnosed with dyslexia and discalculia currently has the retired head teacher from her old pre prep and used to have the retired deputy head of her primary school as tutor. Both ex maths teachers. We discovered both were tutoring via teachers still working that they had kept in touch with.