Being 'behind'.

One of the many great things about HE, is that it doesn't really matter if a child hasn't done something that (according to school timetabling) they 'should' have done.  I discovered today, having got to the character 'Add', that although K's mental arithmatic isn't bad given time and quiet, she was very reluctant to write down working in more tricky addition sums.  It turned out that she wasn't really sure what I meant when I asked her to write her working talked about 'carrying', even though she had obviously grasped the concept without realising that was what she was doing when adding numbers in her head. 

So we had a look together and I made up an example, something like:
  1 000 056
+   999 985

I showed her what I meant by carrying, writing a little number one as a reminder, getting the answer 2 000 041.  Then to emphasise the point, I did the same sum, but instead of carrying, I wrote the whole number we'd got from each column down as the answer, ending up with 19 991 311!  K found this very funny and I think helped her understand.  After this we worked through the few questions I'd put on the worksheet I'd made for her and she started to gain confidence.  I suggested that she would probably benefit from a bit more practice and she agreed, so I have used this website to make another worksheet for her.  It may well be that children in school have already covered this some time ago (K is 9.5), but it's only recently that K has been willing to consider doing things any way other than her own, but now that she is, when we do come across something that she doesn't 'get' immediately, she's willing to listen and give it a go and generally, when I find the right way to explain it to her, she cracks it, has a bit of a practice and is ready to move on, at her own pace.

In other maths news, I like playing Words With Friends on my phone and M in particular likes to help with suggestions.  Following a particularly good set of letters today, I was 220 points to 115 with my friend, which M was very impressed with.  I pointed out that I had nearly double and asked how many more I'd need to have exactly double and M answered correctly, barely pausing to think about it.  We seem to have had quite a few of these instances lately.