We were playing Scrabble tonight, which is an excellent practice for spelling, of course, but also for math. Monet wanted to keep score, so we let him. When it came to adding nines, I saw that he was struggling and wanted to help him learn "the trick" to adding nines. As soon as I started explaining the adding method, he broke down. In some ways, I attribute this to our time with a charter school and the necessity of teaching in a manner that was not received well by the child and at a time when he just wasn't ready. Before long, he had completely shut down and was rubbing his eyes and crying. Because he had reached the stage of totally shutting me out, I sent him to his room to cool off. After he had stopped being hysterical, Bohemian and I both went up, and I explained to him that I loved him very much and wanted to help him, but that he was shutting me out, much like he did the time he made muffins and then realized there were too many for each person to get only one, but not enough for everyone to have two. Thus, the lesson of fractions. However, when I began to teach him the lesson of fractions with the muffins, he shut down. When I reminded him of this time, and how we solved the problem by counting each muffin and "naming" each one for a person in the family and then dividing the rest and "naming" each half for a person in the family, he nodded. Yes, he remembered that. I told him that this was the same thing. He just needed to relax and be open to being taught. Sure enough, we were able to take adding nines step by step. First, we counted on by tens. Then we counted backwards from any given number. Then we counted on by tens from any given number. Soon, he was able to count by tens from any number and could count backwards from any number (but with some difficulty. This will need some work). Before long, he was able to understand the concept of adding nine to any number...add ten, subtract one.
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