Ok so all school year DS has had to do mental math all year in school, no manipulatives, no fingers to help. They just threw them in on the first day with addition and didn't look back. So this has caused a problem when it comes to math because while he gets the concepts it takes him forever to do any problems because he's trying to figure it out in his head. We have told him repeatedly that he can use his fingers or blocks of the unifix cubes to help him figure out his math problems but he keeps going back to mental math and getting stuck and taking 2 hours to do 20 simple addition problems that should only take him 15 minutes tops. HELP
My oldest is a mental math person.. and it starts to get frustrating to me because he won't write out his work and then when things are wrong I can't even figure out why or how he went wrong. Sorry I'm not much help.. I tell Garrett all the time to show his work... so maybe you can use the same line.. and tell him that showing his addition work is as simple as drawing little dots on the page.
No help here honestly - my son is a mental math person as is my husband. It's taken me 2 years to get him to show ANY work and it doesn't help DH tells him to do it in his head - UGH!!! Nothing "made" him show me the work - I just kept telling him he had to show it to me if he wanted me to help him understand it. We have laminated graph paper and tons of other things that "help" but making his work temporary. And now I only make him show me work if he got it wrong. Like today - SHOW ME HOW 5+2+1 = 2.... no kidding that was his answer and all that had happened was the decimal point was lined up wrong making his mind see 2+0....
Handsome is a mental math person too. We consider him a human calculator and he is very good at it. Now Ems is far from a human calculator but sometimes I think that she thinks she is.LOL
