Strategies to Facilitate Math Concepts and Homework.

Regina Richards received a frantic call at her education therapy clinic. It was Sammy's mother. Sammy was one of her clients who usually worked on reading. "I just picked Sammy up from school," the mother exclaimed. "And he's pretty hysterical. It seems he doesn't understand the words his teacher is using in math. He says he's going to flunk the class because of these words."

This story starts a practical article for parents and teachers on helping children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and dyscalculia with math. It is a newly updated article, exclusive to LD OnLine, titled Strategies to Facilitate Math Concepts and Homework.

Here are some of the strategies to facilitate math concepts and homework recommended in the article:

1. Be sure that the child is relaxed so that he can "take in" new information.

2. Hook new vocabulary words to something that is familiar to the child. For example, Regina Richards taught Sammy the word "circumference" by reading a story about a table made from a tree. The bark around the tree represented the circumference.

3. Teach children the morphology or word parts. For example, "multi" means many and "equi" means equal.

4. Use rhymes to help them remember. For example, the rhyme, "A meter measures 3 ft. 3. It's longer than a yard, you see."

5. Color code the "ones" column and the "tens" column to help them line up the two columns when they add. This is particularly important when they learn to carry numbers.

6. Teach patterns that make things easier, such as writing the digit twice if you multiply by 11.

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