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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Blocks, buttons, coins, anything you can push into two piles and back together. Ask which numbers fit inside other numbers and let the child show you rather than tell you. This is the difference between a child who works out thirteen take four by knowing that thirteen is ten and three, and one who has only ever been asked to recall an answer. The first way keeps working when the numbers get bigger.
We shall show you the easy way (Quran 87:8). Looking for the route a child can actually take, instead of insisting on the one that has already failed, sits well with that promise.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analytic review of working memory training found reliable gains on the trained tasks and no convincing evidence of transfer to reading, arithmetic or everyday attention. The practical lesson is that time is better spent on the mathematics you want the child to have than on general mental exercises meant to make maths easier later. That review examined training programmes rather than teaching methods, so it argues by elimination rather than proving this particular activity works.
Melby-Lervåg M, Hulme C. (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review.. Developmental psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Seeing the parts inside a number is what lets a child rearrange it instead of hunting for something memorised.
Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.
A child who talks well, listens well and seems bright will have their reading failure read as laziness. The strengths are exactly what makes the blame stick.
A child working words out from the pictures and the shape of the sentence is guessing well, not reading yet. It usually holds up until around the third year of school and then gives way, because the pictures stop and the words get longer.