"How do I teach you this?"
"How can I help this child better understand?"
"Do I need to change curriculums?"
"Do I keep going over this until it 'clicks' or do I move on and come back to it again later?"
I cannot answer all those questions (because the answer will be different for each child and situation), but I can share with you what I've learned along the way. Hopefully, you'll be comforted to know you're not the only one facing this, ideally you'll find some ideas, resources, and encouragement to help you along the way. *** I do not work for RightStart, nor am I affiliated with them in any way. I am simply a satisfied customer using their product & sharing personal insights I have gained through my homeschooling experience. RightStart is a trademark of Activities for Learning, Inc. |
Where I'm coming from:
After completing the first 9 lessons, I knew something wasn't working the way I expected. When I showed my son any quantity over 5, he would randomly guess. I would encourage him to say the "Yellow is the Sun" song, which aided my first son, but doesn't seem to do this kiddo a lick of good. We've said and sang, "Yellow is the sun, six is five and one" at least fifty times already in this short school year, but he still only recognizes 6 tallies as "5 and 1." Doesn't say 6. If prompted, "How much is 5 and 1, remember, Yellow is the sun....." He says, "9?" Auditory learning is not proving to be his strong point, I am noticing that in phonics as well. How do we teach phonics to someone who is not an auditory learner? Ha! If I figure that out and post it, I may just gain a following on this little blog. Back to math...
Do I stop progressing forward in the teacher's manual and just focus on getting him to recognize the numbers 1-10 correctly when presented visually? If I move on, will he learn the difference between 6, 8, 9, 10 and 7 just by repeated exposure? Or will he get increasingly confused and frustrated and learn to hate school and math? Put on the brakes right there, that is not where this mama wants to go. I lean toward favoring a mastery approach rather than spiral, so I looked briefly at the sample lesson for Math U See's Primer. Nope, that's way over my son's head at this point and it doesn't look like it would hold his curiosity the way the colored cards and smooth plastic tiles in RightStart do. Don't get me wrong, Math U See is an excellent program and it really helped my middle school student. It's a slower-paced repetition leads to mastery approach where one day's lesson builds a bit on the day before. I just need something a bit more wiggly and engaging for my kindergartner.
Forgive me for the disorganization of this post. Likely, it should've been broken into at least 3 posts, but it's a compilation of what I've learned over 2+ years. Do at least skim read if the intro has piqued your interest, as there are some goodies down near the bottom like a hint about what to do if your child is protesting when called to do math and the Warm-Up isn't going smoothly.
For example, I found out immediately that the suggested activity involving clapping/tapping confused and frustrated my child. We simply stopped doing it because he was learning the same objective through other teaching methods. Also, as I discussed above, we dropped off doing the "Yellow is the Sun" song/rhyme since he was entertained by it, but not retaining it whatsoever. He would ask me to sing it, "What is the Yellow is the Sun, Mom, will you say it?" but even after having him repeat the first sentence dozens of times, he could not remember more than this: "Yellow is the sun, [insert pause and confused, silent stare]... is five and one." He remembered the rhyme, but not the number [6] it pertained to. So, despite his enjoying it, it was a waste of our time. I cut back to using it only one sentence at a time about once a week as a reminder. Thankfully, RighStart teaches the objective of the song in other ways, so by omitting this song, I was not skipping out on teaching him something he needed, nor was I weakening the curriculum. For his particular needs, I strengthened the program by customizing it to meet his learning style. This is not to be confused with cutting out a learning objective, which should not be done.
2. Do not let a schedule dictate your child's learning pace. I'm not saying you can't utilize a schedule in your homeschooling day or year, but it should not dictate when you move on from one lesson to the next. This sounds really simple and common sense, but as a left-brained,Type A, list-checking off kind of mom, I was often tempted to move ahead just because, thinking...
Well, maybe we should just move on to the next lesson. He will probably pick up on this concept with the reinforcement that is built into the next lessons down the line. Besides, we're both getting bored with the activities, even though they vary, we are just working on the same concept. It's not like we haven't covered it thoroughly..."
Some Specific Additional Resources that Helped me Along the Way:
On Learning Styles:
Cynthia Ullrich's The Way They Learn was a great book to open up my mind to the variety of ways children and adults take in, process and store information. Learning styles are described and assessed in greater detail than in the above resource. Also, Dianne Craft has some interesting points about the differences between left-brain and right-brain dominant individuals and how they learn, as well as potential nutritional components. She has been working with severely dyslexic middle school students, so her curriculum and lesson plans are geared toward reading and writing rather than math, but if you have a struggling learner, it's one resource to consider. Her eye-eight exercises were too intense for us, so we're doing some exercises from eyecanlearn.com.
I still am unsure exactly what my son's difficulty is in terms of a diagnosis or a name for his exact struggles. I know auditory learning is not his strongest mode, and that he struggles with tracking while reading sentences on a page. (He has since gone to Vision Therapy which did not resolve this, but was beneficial). I know right-brain, global teaching methods appeal more to him. Sometimes all of these labels can be helpful, sometimes they can be frustrating or confusing. No two children are alike. I find it helpful to look at activities that are designed or marketed to a specific group of struggling learners and assess whether or not those resources would be beneficial to us. (*Updated: I've been working on compiling this post for 2 years... I'm struggling with how to organize all the info. However, at this point we are 90% sure via professionals that my hard-worker is dyslexic.)
Math Specific Resources:
We worked on the activities in the Dyscalculia Toolkit which geared toward recognizing, naming, and understanding the relationship between quanitities 1-10 steadily for 2 months. After that we were able to re-enter our RightStart Level A lessons. My son wasn't anxious about math anymore. He was able to focus on the concept being taught, because he was no longer confused by the numbers themselves. This was the most important gem of information I gleaned from Ronit Bird. Some kids don't inherently or intuitively figure out the connection between the numbers 1-10, even if they can accurately count from 1-10. In other words, they've memorized to say the word "six" after "five" when counting, but they do not grasp that six is a quantity exactly one larger than five and that is why we say it in that particular order.
Tactile - Specific Kinesthetic Activities to Incorporate into RightStart
small_dot_cards_grouped_in_5s_for_use_with_righstart.pdf |
Which cards should you use? It is your choice whether to use only one type of card, such as bead cards, or to use two or more types mixed together. You want to have enough cards to play a few minutes, but you don't want to include sets that are causing more stress/challenge than needed. (For example, if your child struggles with the dot cards because quantities are not represented in groups of 5, I suggest omitting them until your child has mastered quantities 1-10 sufficiently utilizing groups of 5. Grouping in 5s is part of the backbone of this wonderful curriculum. If they always want to count individual dots, set those aside for now. Dot cards may make more sense to students after they learn about even/odd in later lessons.)
Which numbers/quantities should you use? If your child, like mine, does fine with numbers 1-5, but struggles with 6-10, then start playing the game using #s 1-6. Show him the six before the game and tell him what they are when he forgets. The key for my kids was to have only one number mixed in that was hard for them to remember. Keep the numbers they are good at in the game so they build confidence. If they are only really comfortable naming quantities 1-3, then start with numbers 1-4 involved in the game. Once your child masters that one "hard" one you were focusing on - so they are naming right just as often as they name the quantity 1, 2, or 3 right - then you can add in the next number you want to focus on. You may choose to do them sequentially, but I find it easier to introduce 6 (5+1), 7 (5+2), 8 (5+3), 10 (5+5) and then 9 (5+4). The only reason for this is that if they've learned 10, they can see the visual cue that 9 is one less than 10, or in easier language, 9 would need one more to become 10.
Setup& Play: Sit facing one another with abacuses in front of you and the deck of shuffled cards (that you chose according to the guidelines above) off to one side. Each of you makes sure your abacus is cleared (shows zero) and draws a card from the pile. Do not show the other person your card, but instead enter the quantity on your abacus. Now, the abacuses in front of you show both of your amounts. Ask your child what they got after they've entered it. If they forget, tell them what it is without any negativity or added prompting. The player with the larger number wins and keeps both cards in a pile by them. Those are like "points." Repeat until the drawing pile is empty or until you decide to be done. Asking questions is a form of testing knowledge. We don't want the conversation to become quiz-like where the child feels put on the spot every time they have a turn. Keep it casual. Sometimes I tell them what they have on their abacus, "Oh, wow! You got a 6!" and then ask them what I got. Or I ask them which number is greater and I name both of the quantities. The goal is to keep them engaged in the conversation and have lots of quantity naming going on without stressing the child about the fact that they may not know or may keep saying the wrong quantity for a certain amount. It's painfully simple, yet my 5 year old adores it and my 8 year old wanted to play too.
**If you don't have 2 abacuses, but you want to try this game, you could allow your child to enter their number first on their abacus, and then afterward enter your quantity 2 lines below theirs so they could compare the quantities. I suggest they enter the amount first so they can use the first line and practice using the abacus as they're taught in RightStart.
In the picture below, we are utilizing a dice when working with quantities. This is just one more idea we had since RightStart sometimes asks the child to say the number and show the number with tallies and the abacus. He really enjoyed the dice games we played, so the dice brought an element of fun to the lesson.
A Note About the Warm-Up Section:
"I don't want to go! ...
Not right now, I'm doing _____...
Can't I just finish _______? ...
But I'm already _______ ...
In a minute!" are common frustrated yells our son puts out many times we need to transition activities or locations. I figured the whole reason the warm-up is at the beginning is to get their little brains into math-gear, and my son dislikes switching gears. So, we'd trudge (power struggle) our way through the warm-ups and usually the mood and tone changed once we hit the "meat" of the day's lesson in the Activities section.
One day it finally dawned on me (we were on a lesson in the 50s or 60s)... What if he's not just having trouble transitioning? What if the recall necessary for the warm-up lesson is the most challenging part of the lesson for him AND I am making him do it while he's busy trying to transition/switch gears? So I tried something different. I had him do the first line of warm-up activity, but when he showed the first sign of frustration, I switched gears, said, "We'll come back to using the abacus later (setting it aside, so he knows it's not done), let's see what else we'll be talking about today." His ears perked up, his tension reduced a little and we moved on without a power struggle. I taught half the lesson, found a good place to pause, grabbed the abacus and did one more element from the warm-up. We completed the lesson (or the portion of it I planned for the day, many days we do half a lesson at a time) and then did any remaining warm-up elements. We've done this many times and it is helping math go much more smoothly.
A Note about Skip Counting (Counting by 2s, 5s, etc.):
My son was all over the place with counting by 5s. One day he could do it without the abacus, then for 3 days he struggled while using the abacus. The next two days he did it without the abacus with ease, then back to needing the abacus. What is going on here? I'm not entirely sure, but I did recognize that whether it was an 'easy' skip counting day or a 'struggling' skip counting day, he definitely did not enjoy this part of the lesson. He made it clear through grumbling. One particularly difficult day, I thought there has got to be a way to turn his attitude around to try 'save' this math lesson from becoming a power struggle. I spied a stuffed animal monkey with ridiculously long arms and legs nearby. "Grab that monkey!" I told him. He looked confused and hopeful that he was getting out of a math lesson. No such luck. I explained to him that we would make the monkey really smart by teaching him how to count by 5s. The way to do it, I would say the first 5 while throwing the monkey to my son. He would say the next multiple while throwing to me. Back and forth, all the way to 100 and then we switched and had my son starting by saying 5 (since he had only said the 10s before) while throwing and we did this to 100 so he had heard it twice and practice it once fully. He asked to do it 3 more times!
Results of Staying the Course with Mastery Focus:
Hear me now, you don't have to. You don't have to compare your teaching style to mine. You don't have to feel obligated to try even one of these many suggestions I've collected and explained. You don't have to feel guilty if you turn away from this post and don't implement any of it. I didn't create this post to boss anyone around or to make anyone feel like they should compare their homeschool math to our homeschool math. That's not the point here.
I created this resource to share what helped my son tremendously. I struggled to find more activities. More ways to incorporate his hands and his strong visual perception. I created this because I wish I could've found it. My son, who I can still refer to as my hard-worker, because academic lessons don't come easy to him- has continued to progress through RightStart at the expected pace so far. Now, I cannot predict the future. However, after spending days and days and days trying to teach him the number 6, I count it solid victory that he completed level A in kindergarten and completed level B in first grade. He's working in level C now and is hitting some road blocks with the writing assignments. RightStart has far less writing than many other math curriculums I've seen, but we are still adapting as I'm seeing how frustrating and strenuous writing can be for a dyslexic. But he's struggling with getting his hand to do what his brain tells it, NOT with the math concepts. The day will come. We still haven't hit multiplication yet, so we'll tackle that as it arrives, and long division I'm sure will create chaos in our little learning environment. I'll be calling RightStart for suggestions and referring to the Dyscalculia Toolkit when we hit rough waters. I haven't figured it all out yet, either.
You know your child best. Approach suggestions like you would a grocery store. Add what you want to your cart of resources, leave the rest behind guilt-free.