Teaching Math Facts to a Struggling Learner

Try to work on facts every day for 5 to 10 minutes. Some days, let the child pick which method to drill with.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Flash cards, (If you make your own, write answers on the backs, but make sure the answer can’t be read through the cards),
• Wrap-ups are one of our favorites. They are a set of plastic strips, about 1 1/2 by 6 inches, with a string tied to one end. Problems on the left, scrambled answers on the right, notches by each. Wrap the string to make lines from problem to answer, then turn it over. If you are correct, the string will line up with the grooves on the back of the strip. So it's self-correcting and tactile. I used to hand my child 4 to do whenever we got into the car. Available for all the operations and also for States & Capitals, and other facts, from Timberdoodle.com
• Drill with The Mad Minute, Calculadders, or another workbook. Frank Schaeffer workbooks are cheap and available at teacher supply stores. Try enlarging these drills with a photocopier, because some children find larger print easier, even if their vision is perfect. These workbooks can be used untimed, to reduce stress.
• A simple board game you can make. Get or make a ‘hundred’ sheet (grid of 10 X 10 squares, each about a square inch, numbered 1 to 100), two pieces from Clue or any board game to be the players (or you can use coins, beans or buttons, as long as they are not identical), and two 10-sided dice from any specialty game store. Get different colored dice. When it’s your turn, roll the dice, announce the numbers, add them aloud, move that many places forward. First person to get to the end wins. You can vary this to cover different operations, e.g., subtract smaller from larger number.
• Bounce on a mini-trampoline as you practice addition facts: Make a poster with lists of digits on it, in random order, maybe 40-50 numbers in all, in 3 or 4 columns. Then each day tell the child what to add to the numbers on the chart. For instance, one day you might say, “Add two to each number” or “Subtract one from each number.” If you had said, “Add two,” the child would read the first number, let’s say it’s a 5, and as she bounces, she says “five (bounce) plus two (bounce) is (bounce) seven (bounce). Then she reads the second number, etc.
• For multiplication, do plenty of skip counting, (counting by threes, fours, etc.), which helped get the answers to the multiplication facts into my child's head. It was also fun because I let him walk around the house taking one step for each number. Sometimes I told him to steps as large as possible, or to step backwards.

When You’re Not Drilling
— There’s More to Math Than Times Tables

Daily drilling is important.
But for a learning disabled child, you need not spend 5 years working only on arithmetic facts. Your child can work more sophisticated problems. Some PhDs in math and sciences have more trouble with subtraction than with calculus or writing proofs.

So:

Buy or make a laminated grid or table of the facts your child is struggling to learn. When he is not drilling, but doing other math homework, sometimes letting the child look up the numbers can help him learn those facts. It’s also less stressful than agonizing over one fact for two minutes.

Or let a student who has had long standing trouble learning math facts use a calculator to help only with simple arithmetic.
For example, here is one way to use a calculator when learning long division.
Suppose the problem is 744 divided by 8.
The child knows that 8 does not go into 7, but it goes into 74.
How many times?
Suppose the child guesses 8 times. She writes an 8 in the quotient, over the first 4.
She may use calculator to see that 8 x 8 = 64 and to subtract 74 -64 = 10.
The answer should be smaller than 8, so the child sees that answer is too big.
So the child erases the 8 in the quotient and tries 9.
The child uses the calculator if she is not sure about 8 x 9, and she may use the calculator to find 74 - 72 = 2.
The child knows to bring down the 4, getting 24.
The child then estimates how many times 8 goes into 24, and uses the calculator to check her guess.

Similarly, a child solving 11x + 150 = 7, may use a calculator this way:
Writes 11x + 150 - 150 = 7 -150. Uses a calculator to subtract 150 from 7, gets -143.
Writes 11x = -143.
Uses calculator to divide both sides by 11.
writes x = -13.

© 2006 Katherine Kuhl