Cracking The Mental Block

(For the purposes of the article the name of this pupil has been altered.) Background Wendy was a happy 8 year old with excellent parental support. At school she was working at the TA supported table in maths and did not have the confidence to attempt working alone. In other subjects she was working well at school. The issues While Wendy appeared to be able to complete some reasonably complex tasks she had not grasped the basic concept of addition and was relying on counting as her fallback method. This resulted in a lot of mistakes and an inability to process problems that involve more than 3 steps. Secondly her understanding of place value was patchy. Often when asked to add 10 she would add 1, (or 100 if it was a larger number). The solutions The cornerstone of successful maths are the basic number bonds of single digit addition and subtraction. We used objects to explore how 6 can be split into (0,6) (5,1) (4,2) (3,3)and talked about the different ways this could be written down. Once I was convinced that Wendy understood we used different single digit totals and she demonstrated the number bonds. We discovered that Wendy was an oral learner and her main block was identifying what she was being asked to do. Her reliance on TA support was due to her need to hear rather than read a question. To overcome this I encouraged her to verbalize her thought process as she worked. We used board games, computer games and homework worksheets to consolidate the number bonds and she can now complete 2 digit addition independently. Her second block, we realized also originated from her oral learning style. While she could happily count in tens, and add 10 mentally to a number above 20, adding ten to any number in the teens caused a blank due to the way the numbers sound different. To overcome this we worked on repetition to fix the aural pattern in her memory and the use of simultaneous visual stimuli. As Wendy has become more confident, the length of time she is able to focus has improved and she is able to work faster. We are beginning to introduce more subtraction problems- initially a source of fear and dread-and begin addressing multiplication tables. Her target is to join the main of her class for numeracy work.