Tailoring Your Math Lessons for your child with dyscalculia while homeschooling.

Dyscalculia is a spectrum that has no one magic solution. While it may seem that sending your child to a specialist or to school may be easier than trying to struggle with your child, those options may not be available. Unlike dyslexia or ASD, help for dyscalculia is not easily available as awareness of this condition is not as widespread. If you do have professional help where you live, I'm happy for you. 

So, what's a homeschooling mum to do? As with other things, we can start with learning about the condition to focus on areas where our child needs the most help. This may prove to be a steep learning curve at first, but consistency is the key. Half an hour spent each day can add a lot to your understanding. 

Your readings should consist of information about dyscalculia and teaching guides on how to teach specific Mathematical concepts. For example, arithmetic is an area most people with dyscalculia struggle with. It is also one of the most basic areas and thus helping your child to master this will help her to move on to later stages. 

This background knowledge can be linked to the teaching tools that you just learned or already know to tweak areas in your teaching. This can be as simple as putting your text in different colours to designing the lesson flow of your presentation to increase the potential rate of understanding. Knowing that poor working memory is one area of concern, you can make use of pedagogy that helps working memory, for example through using concrete materials that your child can see before you instead of trying to remember figures in her head. 

As you read further, you may want to read more on related fields like neuroscience and explore alternative methods of teaching. Studies on brain injury can provide useful insights into how the brain processes numeracy and spatial knowledge. Learning about how different cultures work on arithmetics can provide you with ways that your child can finally make head and tail of. There is no one way to do Math. Your child may finally do division from a method half-way across the continent. 

Another challenge with dyscalculia is that your child will likely forget what you have taught her even recently. Recording your lessons, may be a solution to this as the child can simply play back the recording of lessons that she has forgotten. This may sound silly, but youtube and online learning platforms have proved helpful for many students around the world. The difference is your videos are tailored for your child, plus you will appreciate not having to constantly repeat yourself. 

Since you are already planning out your lessons and recording, you may want to invite others whose children are at the same ability level or thereabouts to join your recording through online lessons. This way your child can also benefit from peer learning through group work and be exposed to methods she can learn from her peers. My child has benefited a lot from at first having her younger sister in her lessons, and later from peers I invited to join. 

To organise, you can use teaching platforms like Google Classroom (actually it's the only one I know) to store videos and other resources from your lessons. You can even store your child's work here so you can monitor her progress. Thus, this will be a virtual library of resources you made and curated and a way to assess your child's progress. 

So, in other words, it will still be a struggle, but it will, God-Willing, be a fruitful one you will travel together in and even gain some friends along the way. 

Sample of a lesson on sequences for IGCSE 0580