Math struggles

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Beast Academy curriculum is fantastic as a supplement. She can take a short quiz to see what level she’s at. The story / comic book format is engaging and funny and teaches kids strategies for solving math problems. you can start with the level that’s right for her based on where she is at. I would stay away from pushing memorization.

No, just no.

Beast Academy is great for kids with strong deductive and inductive reasoning skills. It’s a challenging curriculum. I’ve taught kids who have a math strength—ready for some pre-algebra concepts in fourth grade—who flounder with BA. Kids with weak number sense really struggle with math-based deductive reasoning. Also, the curriculum doesn’t cover the types of thing we do to build up a sense of the base-ten number system—number grid puzzles, writing numbers in expanded form, using different sorts of manipulatives to represent math concepts, multisensory learning.

What OP needs is a tutor with training and lots of experience working with kids who have weak number sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We realized towards the end of this past school year that DC was in the bottom fourth of their class.

We got a math workbook which covers the same material as last year's class from the local bookstore and we do one page each day. DC now is getting much better at math. She just needed more practice than she was getting at school (and there is no homework at her school in lower elementary).

We plan to continue to reinforce/supplement using math workbooks at home going forward.

We now suspect the top students were getting some kind of reinforcement outside school, either in person at a center -- or at home using a workbook supervised by a parent.

Pretty intense score keeping for lower elementary. Maybe they really are just smarter than your kid. You'll never know, so stop blindly guessing what other parents are doing outside of school and trying to keep score. Do your worksheets and focus your own kid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We realized towards the end of this past school year that DC was in the bottom fourth of their class.

We got a math workbook which covers the same material as last year's class from the local bookstore and we do one page each day. DC now is getting much better at math. She just needed more practice than she was getting at school (and there is no homework at her school in lower elementary).

We plan to continue to reinforce/supplement using math workbooks at home going forward.

We now suspect the top students were getting some kind of reinforcement outside school, either in person at a center -- or at home using a workbook supervised by a parent.

I had a similar experience and we are at a small school with talkative kids and parents, so I realized things in the reverse order that you did: first I realized that 80% of kids were getting outside tutoring, and then I realized that my DD was in the bottom third of her class in math, but ranked high in other subjects. The tutoring thing became a big issues because we had a substitute maternity leave coverage teacher for much of the year in math, and kids kept telling her “we already did this!” when she introduced new topics or units. It turned out they hadn’t learned it in school but in Kumon, Russian math, Mathnasium, and with online tutors. The result was that the teacher skipped those topics and pressed onward. My DD was so lost and thought she was stupid until we unraveled what was going on. I found out about the widespread tutoring slowly after there kept being conflicts with basketball, Girl Scouts, bday parties, etc.

We spent ~20 minutes daily this summer redoing 3rd grade math and having her learn 4th grade math ahead of 4th grade. The biggest thing that I’m worried about is her confidence, which is why we put in work this summer. I needed her to believe that she can tackle math and not sideline herself because she doesn’t feel like she can keep up.