A RIGHT START
The practical value of arithmetic... goes without remark. But [t]he chief value of arithmetic... lies in the training it affords to the reasoning powers, and in the habits of insight, readiness, accuracy, intellectual truthfulness it engenders.—C.M. Mason
Bright blue and yellow beads slide and click across the wire. 'Yellow is the sun, six is five and one,' I sing, and she slides 5 blue beads and 1 yellow. Four yellow beads are left to make 10; that's easy to see without counting, and she pencils a 4 in the equation.
The susurrus of avocado leaves and the snuffling of our Great Dane come through the open window. We make a nest of pillows and blankets against the January breezes, and sprawl on the library rug.
'Let's play that game again!' she says {a full sentence!}, and we shuffle the number cards and spread them out.
I am tutoring again, the same little girl I called Chantal in the post about teaching a selective mute to read.
This year she is enrolled in a private school, but her mother contacted the previous school principal, to contact the kindergarten teacher, to contact me. We arranged for tutoring at my house.
I saw the way they taught math in school, and a placement test for our first tutoring session confirmed that I would be picking up where I left off almost two years ago. Although she has been working more advanced sums and even basic multiplication in the classroom, it is with no sense of place value and little sense of the operations. Counting strategies and rote memorization are beginning to fail her.
So we're going back to lay the foundations; and knowing her to be a bright and intelligent girl, I am confident she will be up to speed in a matter of weeks.
Last weekend, we worked on the first review lessons in RightStart Math Level B. We talked about subitizing {recognizing small quantities without counting}, and practiced with tiles and tally sticks before introducing the AL abacus. Once she understood visualizing numbers 5-10 as units of fives and ones {'seven is five and two'}, she loved using the abacus to play the 'Find the Tens' memory game.
'I want one for home,' she said.
We're only four lessons in, but already I see a new sense of place value giving her sustainable strategies for addition, and soon other operations.
The RightStart program emphasizes the use of games for review, rather than flash cards and worksheets. For example, 'Find the Tens' is a basic memory card game except, instead of finding identical pairs, you match two numbers whose sum is 10. Chantal asked for a second round of the game; she would never have asked for a second worksheet on ‘Addition Facts to 10,’ I am sure.
• teacher manual and selected manipulatives from RightStart Level B •
February 3, 2015