There is a learning disability, called dyscalculia. It’s a number form of dyslexia, where numbers have no meaning. The kids with dyscalculia, must touch each item that they are counting. They can count just fine, but the counting doesn’t compute in their brains unless they touch the item as they say the number. if you watch them play games with dice, you’ll notice that they sometimes cannot even recognize the dots as five or six. They’ll know the ones or two and threes, but they start to stumble with higher numbers without counting them.
These are the kids who are counting on their fingers. You have to go back and teach them the concept. Use dots to represent numbers instead of numberals. Use an abacus. Some of these kids will never learn to do simple math in their heads and will never keep a check book balanced. It seem to be more and more common and yet teachers seldom recognize it.
and gone are the days of memorizing multiplication and division tables... without a calculator they are lost, and even with one they write down whatever it says not knowing it might be off by an order of magnitude because they punched in a number wrong and have no foundation to rely on, they just write it down cause THEY and the calculator are NEVER WRONG!!!
I would love to see how these kids would do with a program called MATH-IT By Elmer W. Brooks.
I was a terrible student, zoned out most of the time because I was so bored. We found MATH-IT when I home schooled the boys. We learned everything together.
Math-It makes arithmetic logical, and captivating for all.