“Lucy” is a delightful young 3rd grader in my 2/3 split main placement. She is always smiling, polite and respectful and speaks with a tiny voice. Her printing is beautiful, far better than mine. She draws beautiful illustrations for her writing papers. But I’m seeing her less in class, since her IEP was approved. Now she is removed from class twice a day for specialized math and literacy instruction.
Working with her in math class, I soon realized her main difficulty with solving word problems is reading and understanding the meaning of the words. Often I am able to simply read the problem slowly and off she goes to solve it. Sometimes a directed question or two will get her going. I also noticed another strategy of hers, to peak at her neighbor’s answers. I chose to ignore this and told her she needed to show her work. Then I helped her as before. Seeing this makes me see the value in having students work together on math problems. A peer could help her get past the words to the math as I did.
When I watch her solve addition and subtraction problems I see her counting up or down with her fingers. At first she tried to hide the counting fingers below her desk. But she stopped trying to hide her fingers when I joined her using my fingers to solve alongside her. She solves multiplication problems with counting and derived facts strategies. Division is difficult for her. I noticed she tries to change the problem to multiplication because that is easier for her.
I give Lucy all the support I can in our classroom. I hope the help she get from the specialist is beneficial as well.
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