Help with teaching simple maths

[IslandGirl]

Hi - wonder if anyone has any tips or advice on how best to teach a young (aged 5 and a half) ASD girl simple maths. We do quite a bit of work at home with her to try to underpin her learning in school as she is achieving "well below the level expected" etc. But I am struggling with getting her to understand even simple addition if it involves a number over 5 as she can only do sums using up to 5 fingers on each hand.

 

Are there maybe any good books or resources or programmes that anyone has used to help their child with maths?

 

Thanks for your help

[flappyfish]

The most important thing is that she understands the concept of addition - she needs to know that it involves 'more', so I would begin with 'here are 2 marbles, get 2 more. How many have you got altogether?'and things like pictures of 4 fish - draw one more then count how many altogether. Games involving throwing a dice and moving along a numbered track (needs to be clear and simple though) and i more bingo are good too. For formal addition, if she does have that concept, instead of only using fingers (although fingers are good!) use counters, cotton reels, milk bottle tops or whatever is handy. You could also encourage her to draw spots ro represent each numberand then add them together. I'm sure her school will be doing all these though. Hope she progresses.

[smiley1590]

i also struggled with this too at school right the way through found it such struggle hard task to get your head round used to get so confused frustrated angry at myself and school teach me one way and my dad teach me around add to all emotion already feeling as i had dyspraxia so found maths concepts blew me away literally i found what helped me learn is break down into small chunks of information rather than whole thing as overwhelm her thought processes! as takes us longer ....

 

and may get physical objects to help you visual aids as this may help her process much better than she would without! counters pens pencils to count with get her count with you together then be fun enjoyable less chance of stressful meltdown situation to occur start develop to begin with!

 

good luck

 

XKLX

[caci]

Just to back track a little, can she reliably match one to one as she counts objects ?

 

I worked with a child who could chant the numbers up to 100 easily, but when given 4 blocks to count could not move them one by one and come up with 4. She would either ocunt too quickly or too slowly, and it took at least a year to get her to manage to correctly match and count up to 5 objects (she was 7yrs old at the time)

[RainbowsButterflies]

To reiterate what caci is saying, there are 3 lots of numbers a child can count to. Firstly they can count up to 100 or whatever. Then how many 'pencils' are on the table (which will be a smaller number). Then hardest of all is 'can you give me 6 buttons'.

 

Once you've reliably got up to 10-20 objects, then you can start on simple addition and subtraction but you need to keep it concrete. Mummy had 5 cakes, but Daddy ate 2 of them, rather than 5 take away 2 if that makes sense.

 

I would also speak to school and find out how they do things. There are subtle variations in teaching maths now and you don't want to confuse things by teaching something different as your little one gets bigger.

 

Good luck

[baddad]

When my son was younger I found computer software the best thing for teaching him maths and early reading. At school they used software called 'number shark' and 'word shark', but these are pretty expensive even in the cut-down 'home' versions. Reader Rabbit was a pretty good, inexpensive series and there was a series of CD's by Dorling Kindersly featuring Penguin and Polar Bear. The beauty of it was he was learning through play (we also had some board games, thinking about it. one was called 'Pop to the Shops' which came from the Early Learning Centre), but obviously that depends on her idea of play! My son loved the PC, but that was in the days before he got his PS2. Can fully appreciate that the PC, even though a good 'runner-up' isn't going to have the same appeal as maybe a DS or Wii or X-Box these days. Perhaps there's software for those available - sort of 'Professor Leyton for Toddlers' or something? Just remembered too there were a number of inexpensive magazines (one had 'The Voodermann' on the cover) we used to buy. The software on the front covers wasn't great, but it did mean something fresh every month.

 

Another aspect of this that helped a lot, I think, is that he was able to take the software into school too. If you find out what stuff the school's using and match it that'll give you a two pronged approach.

Sadly the stuff my son had was mostly for windows 98/XP and unlikely to work on vista/7, so I can't suggest titles. Having said that, you often see the same titles recoded for the new O/S in the bargain buckets at PC World etc, so well worth a look.

 

HTH

 

BD