Friday 24 December 2010

Decorating A Gingerbread House

Numerical Sequencing Problems

When Anya left school at 7 she was barely able to count or write to 20.  I understand children all learn at different stages but what concerned me was that I had been battling at home to assist Anya to count but the school seemed unaware that she had problem with Maths at all!  Owen leant to count fairly ‘naturally’ and naturally understood decimal schema which allowed him to count in units, tens, hundreds and then thousands.  As with most children, he didn’t need any special reinforcement to facilitate counting. 

I have been working with Anya and another home educated girl who also has difficulties with counting.  They are not able to ‘organically’ learn to count like most children.  They need imagination and hand on exercises to remember. Both girls are good with money and seem to demonstrate a clear understanding of the value of each number but cannot remember sequencing and confuse the names or certain numbers.

Anya is a kinaesthetic learner so needs to 'do' in order to learn.  We have been labelling the stairs with numbers.  The stairs are a really good resource as they go up along with the numbers and so reflect an increase in value.  After mastering the sequence of steps from 1 - 11 us started labelling the stairs from 4 to 15 etc.  I tend not to stop at obvious points such as 10 as it is these point that present most difficult to Anya, perhaps because these were break points at school. After about a month, Anya became confident with numbers up to 20 (although she does still confuse 12 and 20).