My daughter (8 in the spring) is struggling with several areas of maths.
No problems with literacy, and can memorize maths facts just fine--knows tables, number bonds, and can perform operations just fine.
But she really seems to be lacking in any "sense" of maths and struggles to apply things to actual situations.
She struggles really badly with word problems and does not seem to be able to work out what kind of sums she needs to use to work out a problem. She is awful with number lines and stuff like "What number is 1 less than 8000?", that kind of thing. It's possible that language barriers are not helping (she goes to school in another language than English, her slightly stronger language), but I've tried her with English word/number line problems and it's the same problem. She performs operations very well (I mean addition, subtraction and multiplication sums etc.) but if she does make a silly mistake (which all kids do at times) she does not seem to be able to spot it because she does not seem to have enough number sense to spot when an answer does not "make sense."
I'm not exactly asking for advice here because I really think we are doing everything possible already--she does either 2 word problems or a few number line problems with her father every morning over breakfast, I do some extra work with her when I have time and energy, and she has tutoring twice a week now which includes all these problems. Everyone has tried using manipulatives, drawing out little diagrams and picture stories on paper to show her how the situations in the problems relate to the numbers, all this kind of stuff. Lots of practice problems.
I know that sounds like a lot but I'm desperate to help her before she starts to notice how poorly she is doing in these areas and her confidence starts to slide. I don't want her to feel crap at school.
Is there any hope that she's going to "click" with this stuff at some point, or is she always going to struggle really badly with maths? I'm starting to feel quite down about it all.
Would appreciate hearing some thoughts from posters here whose children have struggled with maths.