Mental maths strategies - sledgehammer & nut?

[minxthemanx]

At the risk of being shouted at by many of you, does anyone else think that several of the current methods of teaching maths are downright confusing for your average child? Have taught for 20 years, am now doing one to one tutoring on the Making Good Progress project - SO many kids are totally confused by "chunking" "near doubles" and the like. If they are not confident with maths, a lot of this focus on mental methods is making life a lot harder for them, and they lose even more confidence. I know I'm prob in a minority here, but once I show them how to do it the bog standard old fashioned way, they suddenly become far more confident. Am I an old fart? Sorry if so, but a lot of kids are mystified by the delights of the Numeracy Strategy.

Uh oh, have I caused offence because all you Mums and teachers think that "chunking" and the like are great ideas?

i have no idea as no children in school yet. But I would guess that, as with anything, children learn best in different ways.
and if they have a teacher willing to show them another way that they can cope with better then that's great!

I think this is mostly about providing pupils with as many different techniques as possible so they can find the one that really works for them. For some pupils the chunking/near doubles etc is great; for others doing an old fashioned column method works better.

Yes I agree, but the problem is that they feel they are 'not allowed' to use the written methods, especially in Years 3 and 4. It hasn't really been covered then, so they are struggling to cope with a mental method that they don't understand, with no back up strategy. I wish the written methods were introduced earlier in KS2, so that less confident mathematicians have an alternative option. By the time they get to me, they have written themselves off completely.

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DS is in Yr3 and is doing well in maths, there is a strong emphasis on learniong times tables and doubles/halves etc which I think is good.
However, having gone on and on about Units, Tens and Hundreds in KS1 it seems strange to me that they don't introduce column adding sooner, it seems to make total sense. Chunking seems quite laborious to me too, but I do feel I am in danger of becoming a grumpy old far too!

This is interesting. I have a dd, now 13, who struggled with, and got massively confused with all the different choices open to her. She had no real sense of number, and, I think, needed to be told "OK, do it this way. That's how you find out how much your sweets will cost and how much change you should get. When you're a bit older you'll understand the theory behind it, but for now it's important that you don't get shortchanged!" Ds, on the other hand, is revelling in all the different ways of getting to the same answer. He grasped incredibly early that whenever you times 6 by 5 it will be 30 - dd didn't trust it not to turn suddenly into 35 when she wasn't looking until she was halfway through year 7!

At a risk of sounding incredibly old fashioned, I think there are some children who may well never grasp the meaning behind the numbers - they just need to be taught how to do the basic calculations they need for day to day life.

seeker I know what you mean. DS seems to really 'understand' numbers. He loves number games and number problems. We have been teaching him about prime numbers at home which he finds fascinating [sad case emotion]
At the same age (age 7) I did not have the same grasp of number work as him and would no way have asked my parents to set me times tables tests for fun!

My DTDs (Yr3) are actually much better at mental maths than me....although my mental maths has come on miles since adopting the chunking method (I assume that is where you break down 435 + 576 into 400 + 500, 30 + 70 and 5+6?). It did seem to take a while to grasp it - especially when the sum "crosses a hundred/thousand)....but now they can do their 2 and 3 times table with any 2 digit number - and I think that is astonishing for 7yos. I do agree that this is a little cumbersome...but it works well for mental arithmatic (which has IMO been a serious flaw in the education that many people of my age suffered). I can also see how it secures the relationships between numbers and the operations...far more so than doing it in columns - which IMO is just a means to an ends.

Having said all that - I think children do all learn differently and that has to be accomodated. They are in top 25% of the class and I am not sure how those that are less capable are managing.

Also I worry about the mixed messages that some children will be getting when it comes to homework - where they have been taught to do it one way in class and then when their parents try and help them they try and get them to do it in columns. Only last week there was a MN poster doing exactly this. I think that this is one of the significant problems with the methods that are taught now - they are "foreign" to parents who don't know how to help - and when they do help they try and teach them something completely different thus confusing them further.

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Yes the way my dd's Yr 3 teacher is teaching maths is very confusing.

I am teaching her the way we learnt hundreds tens, units.

Cant remember the name she said the teacher is teaching to work out her maths but the way we taught seems so much easier than how she is learning.