Practices

The word one does several jobs at once: a digit, a number, a single object, a whole set. A child who has not sorted those out will put figures in the wrong columns and later read a third as a number instead of a part of something.

When digits land in the wrong place, check whether the child knows what is being counted before calling it carelessness. Say the unit out loud: one…

Before drilling number facts, check whether the child has any feel for how much a number is. Which pile is bigger, is eight nearer to ten or to two, give me three of those.

A child with no sense of quantity can still learn to recite that seven and eight make fifteen, and it will be a string of sounds attached to nothing.…

Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.

Use blocks, beads, claps, a drum, anything with an order to it. Ask the child to make the same pattern, then to spoil it deliberately and tell you…

Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.

Feedback lands very differently when the low scores are players who need training rather than facts about who someone is. Do it with their own…