Twice a week, Gus comes home with math drills to do – a sheet of math problems that should be fairly quick and simple, designed to practice computation skills. I understand the rationale for doing them – the math facts that he’s practicing should eventually become second nature so he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time counting on his fingers to learn 17-9=8. But there are some very distinct challenges he has that result from his difficulty focusing, weak fine motor skills and low frustration tolerance. Add to that, the way he’s learned to do his current topic – subtraction with regrouping – lends itself to being a little confusing.
Look at a fairly simple problem:
Notice that there is a lot of crossing out and lots of numbers. Gus is not so organized, and he is usually working in a much smaller space, so his numbers tend to be on top of each other and not so neat. He often will skip the tens column and borrow from the hundreds, or sometimes he’ll add whatever he’s carrying (say a group of tens to the ones column) to the number at the bottom or to some number to the left. He can’t keep track of so many digits on the page.
When I learned to subtract and regroup, I was told to use slightly less crossing out, so I thought that might help Gus.
It has eliminated coming up with the wrong regrouped number, but he still has the problem of overcrowding and numbers sometimes ending up in the wrong columns. So I tried giving him columns and writing out the problems on a big space.
That helps him organize himself a little more. I think we will start using a dry erase board to write out each problem nice and big with columns. It might be doing a little extra work, but I think in the long run it might actually save time if we can cut out the mini-meltdowns between each step of each problem because he’s getting frustrated. At this point, I don’t know what else to do to help him learn this basic and necessary math skill.
Do you have any math tricks to share that would work for a student on the autism spectrum or with ADHD? Any advice would be appreciated! I shudder to think what multiplication and long division are going to be like.
Andrea, you have a wonderful blog and I really feel you are doing so much for your kiddos. We are struggling with math with our seven-year old DD who has Asperger’s and found that I had to demonstrate/model the “plan” of how to do the problem – and do it consistently each and every time. In our case, with second grade math, it’s adding multiples…I would try to explain it, but I was realizing I was tailoring the explanation depending on the problem and changing how I looked at these problems. When I realized that 1. change is not good, especially with kids on the spectrum 2. I was getting frustrated as well 3. the frustration was making her “hate” math, I changed my plan.
First, I clocked onto what she loves…and she loves Pokemon. There are Pokemon Math Challenge books for all different levels. So here we have a great visual that will hold her interest! Next, I took a look at how they modeled a typical “adding three numbers” worksheet. The instructions are *clear* and *written consistently*. For example, the first page on adding three numbers says “Add the first 2 numbers together. Write the number in the colored box [these are numbers set one atop the other, so there is a yellow box for the sum of the first two]. Add the number in the colored box to the last number. Then write the answer.”
Your organization of the above problem in ones, tens, and hundreds columns is on the right track, I think
…maybe even going so far as to color the columns to start with.
I think DD liked the workbook because the instructions were clear and if she had any confusion, she went back to the instructions and read how to do it again. Ability through confidence! The more she practiced on her own the more confident she became. Before this workbook she would have big meltdowns before even starting math. We found that the Errorless Learning approach helped her greatly. She would get so emotional about the subject (math) that all learning was lost on her.
http://bianys.org/learnet/tutorials/errorless_learning.html
Hope this helps! And I look forward to more of your posts/blog
Audrey, thanks so much for your comment and for sharing your method! Gus loves Pokemon also, and I’ve seen his teacher use some of those workbooks – they did work quite well. I’m finding that the dry erase board or the chalkboard is helping as well – the larger space seems to help him. The errorless learning method looks interesting – perhaps I’ll do a post on it once I’ve had a chance to look at it more in depth!
Welcome to the site & I look forward to seeing you again!
[...] does he grasp the underlying concept, but he really seems excited by it. He used to get these math drills for homework of addition and subtraction that were as bad as pulling teeth to get him to do. If he did 12-15 [...]
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