My Middle School Math Salvation

It only took ten years, but I finally found a tool for my homeschool which has redeemed the daily middle school math lesson.  Yeah...I'm the slow student!  I've been doing middle school math for 10 years.  That's right, I am on student #4 and now....NOW, I find this little miracle.

My soon-to-be-middle schooler has had this singular problem with his math:  He can't keep the numbers lined up and so he can't get the right answers.  It takes patience and a steady eye and hand to work through 4721.005839 divided by 76.985 in an orderly enough way to get the right answer. This is his weakness.  It affects every area of his math.

I tried many things.  I have drawn vertical lines on his copybooks.  I have tried standard graph paper.  I also tried printing out larger graph paper, but that just added another delay to getting on with the daily math lesson and I could never keep track of the loose papers.

This product below has made ALL of the difference in the world.  We've been using this copybook for a week now and a magical transformation has occurred !

I found it on Amazon.  Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1497381479/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Because the graph squares are 1/2" he can space out the numbers properly.  (He could not do this with standard graph paper - the cells were too small.)   Because it is a copybook, his daily work is not strewn all over the house and he can easily refer back to a problem he did a few days before for reference.

The greatest outcome has been with attitude - both his and mine!  He feels so good about getting the answers right and I can finally heap on the praise.  He's always been able to understand the math but dysgraphia has made it very difficult for him to get the answers right.  He just couldn't line things up.

What a difference this had made!

We finished Singapore 6 in March and I was planning to repeat it next year.  While he fully understood everything we did in Singapore 6, he still got the answers to so many problems wrong. I thought repeating the curriculum was best, but I was wrong.   The problem has been his inability to line up the numbers and this new copybook proved it.   We've moved on to Pre-Algebra and it is going swimmingly well all because of this discovery of a 1/2 " graph paper copybook.

Today, I actually looked forward to our daily math lesson.  Afterward, he was beaming. 

Hallelujah.

If you have math mishaps of the type described above, maybe this tool can help you?

Peace !