Maths teachers, advice please!

[SlavesToTheKitchen]

I'm beginning to think DS might have dyscalculia. He brought home a maths test he did in class today.

I don't know if I should say how old he is before asking what you think or to ask what age you think he is!

My ds really struggled with maths (y1-3) and I got him a maths tutor, who worked through several strategies. He was amazing and now in y4, things have fallen into place and he’s working independently. We no longer need the tutors but I wouldn’t hesitate to use him again if he starts to struggle. Perhaps consider getting one and see it it helps.

He doesn’t understand place value.

I found Mathsfactor very useful for my child to go right back to basics. I found it much better than mathletics. Maths factor has amazing support and teaches in easy to understand chunks. It’s fun too.
That and a large box of Numicon.

His adding on the whole seems to be fine, It’s the working out tens and units which is the problem. Have you had a meeting with his teacher? And maybe with the head teacher too to see what the next plan of action is. He obviously needs extra support in maths.

I re-wrote it as one above the other and he refused to do it. Story of trying to help him with maths.

The first page of the test was:

Number of objects Cost
1 1
2
3
4
5
6

and he had to fill out the rest of the table.
Then the other page was writing 5 numbers from a pictogram
e.g. one square, two lines, 3 dots = 123
And the final page to draw 3 numbers e.g. 355 as a pictogram

He's quite literally starting his third year on this stuff.

Has he had any skilled intervention?

Out of interest if you roll a dice, can he tell you the score without counting the dots?

He's had intervention...for three years.

I think so, yes. I think it was last year he seemed to have learnt to recognise it, but will double check next time I've got dice out.

There’s intervention and ‘intervention’ though. Do you know if the school were using a specific intervention scheme?

I doubt it. They seem to be doing the definition of insanity. They have their teaching scheme and that is how they are going to teach him.
I'm out of ideas beyond working through the book with him (Ibought a copy to have at home) and letting him use a calculator to do the actual adding/subtracting/multiplying. On the basis that at least that way he will learn what he is expected to do without having the stress of actually doing the maths.
I'm not a teacher and have no feel for maths. I learned tricks to get me through but for other reasons, they don't work for him.

You can try Mathletics free for 48 hours - I would set the level to year 1 or 2 rather than he's actual year though.

www.mathletics.com/uk/for-home/free-trial/

Its been a while since we used it - something easier is down a year, something harder up a year and to get explanations I think its help. Or another online one may well have free trials too - my DS is ASD and learns much better with a computer than a teacher, he hates teachers seeing errors but he can blame computer for everything. Not sure if other maths ones do more explaining but the computer ones are more visual than at school.

Don't know if it will help but something else to try. May need some kind of reward to get him to use it - we used to do hot chocolate and cakes.

I presume his reading is fine / no SEN.

I was going to ask about the dice thing too.
It is called subitising. Is he able to tell you how many there are in a small number of objects without having to count them?

Is he able to tell you how many there are in a small number of objects without having to count them?
Surely what your actually doing is counting them really quickly? Else it's guessing! Speed is his problem, he's very slow to count things a very liable to make a mistake like counting the same one twice.

His reading is fine. It took him a while to click, but once he did there was no problem. He's bilingual and can read in both DH's language and English. He doesn't like it though!

He has several maths apps on the iPad.

DD2 didn't get it until we used the <a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DogTWJATIJD0&ved=2ahUKEwjcpKb0j-DkAhUThlwKHaWUAOcQwqsBMAB6BAgJEAQ&usg=AOvVaw1F1AXA_F-tu2Og01fZPwcA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Montessori Stamp Game. She needed to see, visually, what was happening when she added numbers together or took them away.

I didn't buy it, I just made the stamps out of coloured card and laminated them. It really did change everything for her.

Most people don’t need to count a group of less than 6.

Can he count? Both as in just saying thr numbers (and if so, how far- does he know 9999, 10000), and counting things? Can he count in 2s or 10s?

I have to say i looked at that test and thought “badly taught”, but did assume younger child from the writing. What’s his fine motor control like?

What is his general number sense like? Can he automatically tell you how many fingers you are holding up? Can he do number bonds to 10? How are his times tables? Concept of place value? My DS has dyscalculia and he has real difficulty with all of the above. We had him assessed age 6. He is in secondary now. Sadly, despite the early diagnosis, nothing was really put in place for him at school, and he fell further and further behind. He is in a tiny maths group now and finally getting somewhere. Khan academy is a good (free) online resource and great at helping basic understanding of concepts. No point doing time table rockstars etc as they are practice activities for kids who already get number concepts.

Try teaching him column addition. My daughter has just turned 5 and can do column addition by herself, carrying over 10s etc. My older dd is 10 and struggles with maths concepts and especially telling the time. She used to just guess answers and say completely random numbers, like 76+5, she'd have said "43? 107?" She had no idea how to work anything out. What we discovered over the summer is that firstly she majorly lacked confidence, and secondly, different methods to do the same calculation threw her off completely. Terribly frustrating, but we went back to basics and worked through lots of examples together and now she seems to be understanding a lot more. Until they understand the basics some kids just dont get maths at all.

Totally agree with Hatchimalla. As soon as I saw your son's test, I thought that he was getting confused by the number of different strategies they teach children now. It looks to me like he is mixing up a couple of different ways to do the same sum because he doesn't fully understand the concept of place value. Try and find one way that he finds easiest-my guess is he will find column addition easier and stick to it.

What strikes me is that every single addition on there is correct. And there are quite a few of them, and some he would not have been able to get right without an understanding of place value.

There is:
10+60=70
7+6=13
70+13=83
20+2=22
2+2=4
22+4=26
3+93=96

Not a single mistake there. Clearly he can add.

But why can he do 70+13, (two-digit-number + two digit number, no bridging ten) in his head, without any 'working outs', and gets to the right answer, but when he is asked to do 22+22 (two-digit-number + two-digit-number, no bridging ten) he gets completely mired in a method?

This implies to me that it is really the method that is confusing him.

I am not sure that it is a lack of understanding of place value. If he didn't understand place value, he wouldn't be able to 13+70 in his head, I don't think. He needs at least an implicit understanding of place value for that, though maybe he doesn't have the words for it - doesn't get the terms 'tens' and 'ones' (or 'units').

It looks more like for some reason he doesn't understand how he is meant to decompose the numbers.
Perhaps he missed a crucial session, perhaps it was taught badly, perhaps he lacked the understanding of the words (tens, ones) to be able to follow the explanation.

What he seems to have taken away is that you have to take the digits and add them up separately, sometimes with a zero behind, sometimes not; then add the sums up for the total. What seems to have been lost is that you are meant to add those digits that represent 'ones' separately, and those that represent 'tens' separately (with the zeros).

If I were to work with this child, I would first establish if he understood the place value terminology. Then I would reinforce that, and practise decomposing numbers, by doing a series of exercises of the 341= 300+40+1 type, perhaps with the place value arrows and perhaps with lots of exercises where the numbers are displayed in a table with columns for hundreds, tens, ones.

It also seems to me that this child suffers from low confidence. He can add, as demonstrated in this worksheet. It would probably be beneficial to go right back to something he is good at and build up from there.

Calculator though does not make sense to me. It is after all not the actual calculations that he gets wrong; rather, he can't seem to be able to work out what he is meant to calculate.