dd1 yr 1 can't add 15+7, dh wants to move her to private school. Opinions?

[mumonahottinroof]

DD1 is a sensitive soul and homework with her is never fun. Yesterday I had a lie in and came down to discover her in tears and dh in a fury because he'd spent an hour trying to explain to her how to add 15 + 7 for her homework. She just didn't get it and when she doesn't grap something she gets in a terrible tizz, screams and refuses to listen. Dh fulminating about how we should move her to a private school where she'd be "taught properly"

Now please don't flame, dh was just in a bad mood - he and I agree that the teaching at her school is generally excellent. We are going to move dd to a private school at some point as our local secondary is diabolical but for now I'm happy with where she is. What I want to know is - is a) is it unusual for a 6yo to find this kind of addition hard b) How can I help her "get" it?

By the way, in the end she didn't do homework and I wrote a note on it saying she didn't understand and I didn't think it would help if I just did it for her. Am hoping her teacher (who has just started, old adored one has gone on ml) will read and take note.

As a teacher, I echo all the back off suggestions. If she can't do it, it's really important to let school know. Just a note on the homework along the lines of "dd tried this, with help, for 20 mins, but could not do it". An hour is far too long and no help at all to anyone.
In general, playing with counters, buttons, marbles etc, adding and taking away and counting is really helpful for them at this age. My dd would have struggled with that 'number sentence' at that age and I would have given her real things to count.
Junior Monopoly is good fun, all about adding and doubling numbers 1-5 and she may not realise how much she is learning! Also any board game that involves two dice.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to ask the school how they are teaching her. It will really help you and her if you are backing up their methods, not teaching new ones. Maybe dh needs to make an appointment to talk to the teacher, so he can see how to help.

Lots of good advice here, and I'm not going to give you another idea to try, but I would stress the learning of number bonds, to 20 if she can. Then she will be able (in time) to split the 7 into 5 and 2, add the 15 and 5 = 20, then add on the 2. Good luck, and tell your DH to chill.

The other w/e my dh was in a simiar position to the OP.
DD was doing long multiplication (yr 4) and had been taught the grid method. I only knew about it as I had been a TA in a yr 3/4 class and knew how much easier it was than the long winded way I'd been taught.

DH though, hadn't been taught that way and was about to just crack on with his own method. I explained to him about the grid method which he understood and he carried on.

Some schools are a bit naughty in not explaining to parents new methods of teaching maths and phonics. It can be very frustrating from the children's point of view.

OP, your DH needs to back off homework altogether - as others have said, it's not worth spending that long or (both) getting so het up about it.

My DS is a real maths whizz and will still pccasionally get himself in a complete tizzy if he "can't" do something.

If she couldn't do in her head, or with a number line, or with fingers, I would get out the smarties/buttons/whatever and do it that way. Given the trauma of trying it with Daddy, I would be tempted to make it smarties or chocolate buttons to try and bribe DD back into thinking that maths might be OK.

Merciless teasing of DH until DD recovers a sense of perspective over the whole thing might be called for too?

(incidentally, I got a textbook for primary teachers in an attempt to understand how maths is now taught, and I still didn't understand. For people for whom numbers just make sense (including DS) it seems ludicrously over-complicated. Fortunately DS's teacher grasped quickly that even though he did not get the silly 'recipe' method he knew what he was doing, and she backed off and left him to it)

For people for whom numbers just make sense (including DS) it seems ludicrously over-complicated.

Agree with this. I don't see why the means has become more important than the end in maths these days

i know that they are trying to teach kids to break things down, and use different methods to get to an answer, but, the way i was taught, just seemed easier to remember!

Tho i can't tell you how i was taught, which sounds well thick, but when i saw dd's homework the other day and she was partitioning, i just thought it made it (for me) more complicated. duh!

dd took ages to get round the 15 in my head 7 on my fingers. maybe she's a bit of a maths dope like her mother tho.!!

plus she doesn't get the point, and kids have to work hard at things they don't 'get'. Dd thinks it's a waste of her precious time!

figcake as far as I can see it's a "foolproof" way of teaching designed for teachers who just don't 'get' numbers (bear in mind that even GCSE maths is no longer mandatory for a lot of teacher training courses). DS only ever struggled when he had a class teacher who was not (putting it mildly) a maths specialist, and therefore taught rigidly to the 'method'. It was only one year, but it almost put him off maths altogether . Teachers who did get it were happy that he could explain what he was doing, even if it wasn't the prescribed method - and now he has reached the stage of having subject teachers he and his maths teacher are best buddies .

My dd thinks like that pirate that it's all very unecessary and a waste of time. Give her Tracey Beaker to watch any day

At this age/this level, I think you can get a good long way by integrating maths naturally into real life.

If she wants to buy something, make her pick the correct coins out of your hand. Don;t let her go until she can tell you how much change she needs to bring back from the lady.

If she wants a teddy bears tea party, make her add up the provisions.

If she wants to cook, and you havea duff set of diet scales like mine (ahem) make her figure out how to measure 15oz on a scale that only goes up to 10oz.

If she's impatient ask her to read the time and figure how long there is to wait.

Literally, tell them the problem then potter off and don;t interfere for a while. give the squared paper, if that helps.

The message is "maths is seriously empowering" not "maths is a chore".

Thanks again everyone, 99 per cent of the time I help with homework and it was a bid for feminism to insist dh oversaw some. Gah. Trust him to mess it up so I am lumbered with it all in future

I will try some of the above suggestions plus I am going to ask the school if they can do a session explaining their methods, as someone said we can't be the only ones utterly mystified.

vintage, see i am almost inclined to agree with my dd.!!

In fact i do say, look i know it's boring but hey, we all have to do boring and difficult things.

dd would rather redesign the entire Pokemon characters and write epic tales for them, which she does studiously. Bloody reams of paper in this house.

pirate cat - that's a gift! pokemon top trumps!

Give her a pile of index card, and tell her to draw a picture/description on the top half, and give them scores on the bottom half. Score by their effectiveness against other types attaqck vs defence. 100 possible points to distribute, to define which other types of pokemon they are effective against/vulnerable to.

Say:

Granitor (Rock type) Water-type 50; Fire-type 20; Earth-type; 2; normal-type 2; rock type 8.

You can obviously make it more or less involved!

The whole of pokemon is basically an excercise in being able to do linear lagebra in your head.

Can I just check. Lots of people here saying that their children would struggle with this sum, do you mean they would struggle to work it out using a particular method or they would struggle to work out "if you have 15 sweets and then I give you another seven, how do you have now" type of adding on? (hopes everyone says the latter and I discover I have a surprise child prodigy!)

Old fashioned abacus is useful too.

alien bump I think my dd would have struggled with an abstract sum like that, but if I had put it into words and given her counters, she would have been fine. Some children that age could easily do it in their heads. Maths can be very instinctive, which is why people like the op's dh, and mine, get so frustrated.

Just for experimental purposes I asked dd and she didn't have a clue.

I explained it to her using the head and hand method and an hour later asked her 14 + 7 and after initially guessing 22 she thought about it and corrected herself to 21.

So no, she didn't have a clue how to do it but she learned quickly enough with that particular explanation. I doubt we'd have gotten far with the partitioning method though (15 + 5 + 2) as her number bonds aren't great yet.

Just had to check. Asked my Ds and he naturally used fingers to count on from 14 - number lines are so naff, honestly

" (bear in mind that even GCSE maths is no longer mandatory for a lot of teacher training courses)"

This is totally untrue btw. All trainee teachers have to have Maths and English GCSE (or a prescribed overseas equivalent) and primary teachers have to have a science GCSE.

They also have to pass additional tests in English, Maths and ICT if they are in England.

Any complaints about trainee teacher's lack of Maths skills is despite them having these qualifications.

mummytime is that a recent change? Only my DM used to coach teaching students through GCSE maths (often their 3rd or 4th attempt) and that source of income dried up a few years ago because the requirement was removed - hence my comment.

Also, just scraping through GCSE maths at the 3rd attempt means, IMHO, that you do not 'get' maths and might well have to teach to "recipes" because you are not sufficiently secure in your own understanding to adapt to the way a specific child / group of children is learning.

Some children just learn differently. Try counting out 15 beads into a pile. Count in 7 more, then count the whole lot up.

Just asked my dd how she would do it. She plonked her hand on her head - said "15 in there" then counted on the rest on her fingers. Don't think she would have got there without fingers though.

My dd, year 4, has just done the same as runoutofideas' dd!!

This is a great thread! Sorry, OP - just so many useful and fun tips. dd doesn't start P1 (Scotland) until August, so we're not at this stage yet, but it's great to hear the fun ideas we can help her with in the future. Runout - is that what the head and hands method means? It makes a lot of sense to me.

DS1 is in yr1 at a private prep school and did 15+7 easily, but he does love maths! Unfortunately written work is where we struggle.

If he seems to be struggling I usually remind him to put the bigger number in his head and add the smaller one on to it which seems to do the trick.