Independent Maths

On the advice of the fantastic The Maths Mum, I am very much working for Toby to be independent with his school work.

This weekend I left a small pile of worksheets in Toby’s place at the table. I returned to find the worksheets all completed and stuck in his school book!! There were just a few tiny errors but the majority was correct. The pile included addition up to 20; counting up to 20; matching unfamiliar words to pictures; handwriting and number practice.

I interrogated Rosie to see if she had helped, but apparently not! It was all Toby’s own work.

I have to say I was amazed.

I was even more amazed when Toby got this worksheet correct today. I’ve never been sure if Toby properly understood more or less; and numbers up to 100 are very new. But Toby said / signed every answer correctly so I’m very much leaning towards there being understanding there.

When things like this happen, I do wonder what Toby knows that we haven’t yet tapped into because of his lack of speech.

The bigger barrier to independence is that Toby can’t read questions like this, and needed the words writing in order for him to to write his answers. Tomorrow the answers will be on stickers for him to pop on. However I don’t know how we overcome the reading part easily. We have to simplify the task right down to make Toby understand. Once he understands the task he is away.

I can see Toby making mistakes in future due to not understanding the question rather than not being able to work out the answer. Originally Published on 27.9.2021