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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Division is sharing out, or taking the same amount away again and again until nothing is left. Multiplication is that same amount repeated. Children carried along by pace can perform the steps of one operation while explaining another, and nobody notices until the numbers get harder. Going back is not a punishment and does not need announcing as remedial. It can simply be how you start.
God willing, you will find me patient (Quran 18:69) is what Moses said before following a course of learning whose sense he could not yet see. Going back to the beginning asks that of a child, and it helps if the adult says so plainly.
الكهف
قَالَ سَتَجِدُنِيٓ إِن شَآءَ ٱللَّهُ صَابِرࣰ ا وَلَآ أَعۡصِي لَكَ أَمۡرࣰ ا
Moses said, ‘God willing, you will find me patient. I will not disobey you in any way.’
Qur’an 18:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Nothing here studies the teaching of arithmetic operations, so this is clinical judgement rather than trial evidence. What does bear on pace is a meta-analysis showing that cueing recently learned material during sleep gives a small but reliable memory benefit, which is evidence that learning needs time afterwards to settle. More topics per week leaves less of that time, although curriculum pace itself has not been tested this way.
Hu X, Cheng LY, Chiu MH, Paller KA. (2020). Promoting memory consolidation during sleep: A meta-analysis of targeted memory reactivation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A method learned without its meaning has nothing to fall back on when the numbers change shape.
You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.
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.