During Jon’s whole academic career so far his teachers have always commented on the huge differences between his strengths and weaknesses. His strengths have always been basic word skills; his spelling level has been only slightly lower than his proper grade level, and his reading ability certainly outstrips by several grade levels his actual comprehension of the material.
On the other hand, the one subject where Jon has had very little success is arithmetic. He just never “got” addition and subtraction. For the longest time he assumed that there was some sort of trick to it, that there must be some way of spelling the numbers to get the right answer. He never really understood that addition requires a lot of rote memory—that 2 + 1 always equals 3. For years when asked a simple sum he would answer by randomly guessing a number. As well, most math aids required either visual acuity or manual dexterity, both of which Jon had in short supply.
Tami, Jon’s wonderful teacher who helped him successfully crack the nut of reading several years ago, didn’t stress math too much as she felt (and rightly so) that she should strike while the iron was hot and make as much literacy progress as they could. Unfortunately, then followed a couple of teachers who tried to develop Jon’s social interaction side—somewhat to the detriment of academics, especially in math.
The last teacher did, however, find a couple of math aids that piqued Jon’s interest: The Mathline number line (sort of a mashup between a number rod and an abacus) and the Think-It-Through Learning System, which uses a shallow case with tiles that you use to answer simple math problems from a booklet. When you’re done with the 12 questions, you flip the case over to see if the coloured shapes on the back match the pattern on the answer key.
Jon loved doing his “math puzzles” at school, so we bought a set and number line over the summer*. We were delighted to see Jon starting to memorize certain 1-digit sums (+1; +2; as well as doubled numbers, e.g. 3+3, 4+4, etc.) and hearing his excited yell, “I didn’t have to use the number line!â€. Now he’s starting to lock in addition combinations that are less regular. He’s starting to get the commutative property too (3+6 = 6+3), but that’s not fully there. He doesn’t quite see it as a freebie, yet.
Since the summer Jon’s started the new school year with a new teacher who’s pretty gung-ho on the academics. All of a sudden, Jon’s been coming home most nights with homework in new subjects (for Jon) like history and geography, as well as reading comprehension. As for math, we were gobsmacked when we visited the classroom and saw the teacher whacking his pointer on various 3-digit numbers on the board and asking Jon to expand them (e.g. 341 = 300 + 40 + 1). And Jon was shouting out rapid-fire answers like no-one’s business. Even when it wasn’t his turn to answer. Nerd!
We were even more astounded three weeks later when Jon came home with homework of adding two 2-digit numbers together. We figured this was way too advanced for Jon and had to be a mistake (especially since it was sent by a substitute teacher that day). No mistake: After thoroughly learning about expanding numbers and place values, Jon was now able to do 2-digit column addition: Add up the ones column (using any sort of calculation aid if necessary), carry over the 1 to the tens column and add those up to get the answer. With the help of his number line, Jon roared through almost 20 addition problems, smiling all the way. Amazing!
* Because of Jon’s specialized needs, we’ve had to buy a lot of things online. With a few exceptions, most of our purchases end up being from mom-and-pop vendors from the US. Unfortunately, looking for some of these educational tools online is kind of creepy because you have to wade through a lot of home-schooling websites (and their attendant weirdness) to find the vendors. Talk about an alternate universe! ↩
