Math for Kids Who Don’t Get It

Over the years, I’ve heard from many parents who have children struggling with math. It’s a subject synonymous with frustration for many.

Often, the frustration tones down when students are really shown math’s purpose. When students understand why they’re learning something and are given opportunities to apply it outside of a textbook, there becomes a purpose to learning that’s sadly lacking in many math presentations. As Christians, we should want to show our students math as a way of describing God’s creation, which involves actually letting them see math in action.

For some students, though, that’s not enough. God has wired them in a way where they need additional help memorizing facts and mathematical processes.

My son is one of those. I tried everything I could think of to help him learn his math facts, but it felt like they’d never stick. Reading, too, seemed an impossibility until I found out he likely has dyslexia and began teaching him differently. Watching his progress in reading with a change in approach led to exploring how to change his approach in math too.

While there are a lot of different ways to help struggling math learners, I want to share just one in this post: visuals. Some people’s brains (including my son’s) remember pictures rather than words. This is often referred to as “right-brained” learning; although we all have two sides to our brain, some learners tend to remember better if taught pictorially.

Switching to a more visual-based curriculum helped my son tremendously, but I learned I still had to modify when we hit various stick points, such as with multiplication facts. When I used a program with visual aids for his multiplication facts [Right-Brained Multiplication and Division], he went from hating multiplication to loving it and wanting to learn more in a day. (At least that one day—all kids have their good and bad days.) I began researching ways to make math more visual, both for him and other students wired visually.

Here are a couple of examples of using visual cues (combined with patterns when possible) to help aid memory:

• When multiplied, 1 is like a running back who runs away, leaving the other number behind.
• The negative sign is ornery. It always wants the opposite.
  When two are together, they get hurt and make a medical sign (the + sign).
  
• Manipulatives can also be a great visual. Try to be consistent with them. Visually-orietented students are memorizing the picture of the manipulative, not the fact or the rules, so they need to see it built the same way over and over again repetitively. Manipulatives that help students think in terms of what makes 10 seem to work best.
  7 + 4 = 11
  In the picture, 7 and 3 make 10. The extra 1 makes 11.

Manipulatives can also help make prealgebra more visual. A circle or household object can be used as a placeholder for the unknown.

As they get older, math can be made more visual by such things as using color (such as a different color for the top and bottom of a fraction, different units of measure, different unknowns, or congruent sides or angles) and taking notes (in which they can use color and draw their own visual aids as needed).

There’s a lot more that could be said about helping struggling math learners, but hopefully that give you a few ideas. If your child is struggling with a math concept, I’d love if you dropped a comment and shared about it. I will either respond there with some ideas to try or address it in a future post! Be sure to also check out the resources below for help in making math more visual.

Pictorial Resources
– New visual aids – I’ve put a bunch of pictorial ideas in Visual Aids that are now available as part of my Principle of Mathematics eCourses. The eCourses themselves also show concepts more visually than a textbook can.

– The Big Book of Math is an awesome tool to show visual learners math’s purpose.