He's Done It! Success With Double Digits

I feel like Jack and I have been working for a long time on understanding how to read double digits. I have a couple posts from earlier that explain my approach of using engines and coaches as an illustrative tool to help him remember what to read first. It seemed to get us half way there.

You know what did it? Jack's incredible desire to learn how to tell time. He has been on a mission for almost two months to figure out how to read time. His motivation? A really lame video game called "Monkey Ball" the children have become completely addicted to. Other than Grand Turismo, it is the only video game Jack and Grace have been given. They are allowed to play at 4:00pm for about an hour on a number of given days. So sad as it is, after school is over, it becomes a count down until 4:00pm. For Jack, this begins a constant game of "What time is it?". This game includes constantly running to the oven clock between activities to see how much time has passed between his activities that he finds to do (just to pass the time).

Miracle beyond miracles, this has trained his eye more than anything to read the digital clocks and get the double digits correct for the minutes. Today we played a game of "You name it, you get to keep it". He loves beating his mother at having more cards in his hand after a game is done than me. I did things a little differently this time, and laid out 9 cards in a box before him. He could only take a card if he could say it correctly - incorrectly and it was mommy's card. After three games of this, I had 5 cards, and Jack had the rest!

Joy! Joy! I was so proud of him. What was really telling, was for some cards that he had difficulty with he would point to the first number with his finger, or even trace it, as he tried to recall how to name his "engine" first.

A Fractional Pepper Epiphany

Grace and I reviewed fractions today. The child is a math genius in my eyes. At the age of almost 6, math comes so easy to her.

Today she was doing a math worksheet - coloring a certain number of fruit and veggies displayed in a total to illustrate the fraction presented in each problem. Our last fraction was 3/6. There were 6 peppers.

She sat for a little longer on this, and with thoughtfulness in her voice said, "Hmm. I'll need to decide if these should be green peppers, red peppers, or yellow peppers." That statement in itself surprised me. And after a little more thought, she said with a smile, "Oh. Mom. Look what I'm going to do!". She then proceeded to color the first one red, the second green, and the last yellow. She was so satisfied that her math equation had answered her desire to express all three pepper colors.

I was beaming with pride.

Engines & Coaches: Double Digit Numbers

Jack's only math work consists of recognizing his numbers, and counting consecutively in correct order. Last term was wonderful. He is a flashcard hoarder, and he loved carrying around his 1-25 number cards with numbers on one side and animals on the other. By the end of the term the cards were cake to him, and we were counting to 30 with no skipping.

So I purchased a set that went from 1-50, and we've been dealing with a brick wall ever since. The problem is he is inconsistent in how he reads a double digit number. He'll call 34, 43 instead. Of course he aces numbers like 22, 33, 44, etc. He also aces 20, 30, 40 and 50. Just everything inbetween is read backwards. The frustration lies also in that with our first set of cards we had zero problems with 21-25, but all of a sudden there is confusion.

Just now approaching 4, there is no rush, but as a mother I find myself fighting back the knowledge of links between left-handedness and dyslexia. He is my train fanatic, so I tried explaining that the first number is the engine and the second number is the coach. That he needed to say the engine first. He got the concept, but still struggled with the delivery.

Today we may have had a breakthrough. Laying out the 20, 30, 40, and 50 card on the floor, I handed him a set of 20 cards. I explained that this was the train roundhouse and all of the lost engines needed to make it in the proper compartments of the round house. For example, all 20's engines needed to be laided in front of the 20's card. Jack was amused that his cards were lost, which motivated him to put them back in their correct locations. I noticed as we worked through the cards, a connection was beginning to set in. He still argued with me on a couple of cards insisting that a 23 card needed to go in the 30's slot because of the 3. But we didn't have nearly the same number of mistakes.

Fingers crossed for my little lefty.