Building Math Skills

Help your child analyze and overcome typical math errors

Good teachers try to assess why students are making errors in math. But few have the time to do this for every child with every new math concept they teach.

It helps when parents also know the typical errors children make and ways to correct them. If your child:

• Forgot a step in computation, have her make a checklist for monitoring math work. List the steps in the sequence required to do a problem. Then check each step off the list as she does it.
• Aligned digits incorrectly, have her turn her ruled paper horizontally to create columns for math.
• Used the wrong information to solve a problem when doing applied or word problems, have her circle essential information.
• Chose the wrong operation, ask her to explain the steps she’s taking and why. Suggest she draw or diagram the problem before she attempts to solve it.
• Failed to recognize reasonable answers, ask her to see if an answer “makes sense” by putting it into a real-life, meaningful example. For example, 2 + X = 5. She might say, “If I have two cookies and I want to give one to each of my five friends, how many more cookies do I need (X)?”
• Forgot to write down carried over numbers, suggest she circle these numbers as she calculates.
• Confused or misread plus, minus, times or division signs, she can circle the signs to bring greater attention to them.
• Got the wrong answer because of incorrect math facts, use games and flash cards for repeated drills for addition, subtraction and multiplication. Record math facts and then replay them. See if she can guess an answer before hearing the correct response.

Reprinted with permission from the March 2008 issue of Parents make the difference!® (Elementary School Edition) newsletter. Copyright © 2008 The Parent Institute®, a division of NIS, Inc. Source: “Strategies for Math: Helpful Tips on Learning,” Regents Center for Learning Disorders at Georgia State University, www2.gsu.edu/~wwwrld/Resources/strategiesmath.htm.