Use emotion and storytelling to supplement teaching of math concepts.Create your own fun math songs, or consider Audio Memory Songs to use a musical, right-brained way for kids to memorize addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division facts. Children with right-brain characteristics often have an affinity for music, which can be a wonderful learning tool. Some mastery-based math programs include: Consequently, curricula that teach all of one kind of math process until it is mastered (such as Math-U-See) generally are more effective for these students than programs (such as Saxon, Horizons, or A Beka) which introduce multiple concepts and then review in a cyclical fashion (often known as the spiral approach).

Right-brained students tend to learn in chunks rather than in a linear sequence.

Teach math processes to mastery as whole concepts, rather than repeating and reviewing many math processes in each lesson.

There are many wonderful resources for right-brain oriented children, or for those who just find arithmetic challenging. By using some right-brain oriented strategies and curricula, homeschoolers can help these students be successful in math. For information on left/right brain processing, as well as some online tests to determine brain dominance characteristics, read the previous articles: ' Is Your Child Right-Brain Oriented', or ' Right Brained Learners'.īut what can homeschoolers do for right-brain oriented students who have difficulty with math? Fortunately, the answer is – 'a lot'! Simply by changing how mathematical information is presented can have a tremendous affect on the right-brain learner's ability to assimilate and understand it. Whereas left-brain oriented children tend to excel at logical activities such as math and spelling, right-brain oriented children are often are more successful with creative subjects such as art and music. However it is not uncommon for children who are more right-brain dominant, and therefore process more holistically and imaginatively, to find arithmetic (when it is taught in the traditional fashion) challenging.

Math facts often come naturally for children who tend to be more left brain dominant – the side of the brain that deals with logic, analysis, and linear thought. Learning specialist Dianne Craft has found that 80% of struggling learners are right brain dominant, due to the fact that most curriculum and learning settings are oriented toward the left-brain oriented individual. Researchers at the University of Minnesota estimate that 5-10% of children suffer from dyscalculia, a learning disorder that inhibits the basic understanding of numerical and arithmetic concepts. However, it is likely that learning disorders are not the main cause behind the typical child having trouble with math.įor a large majority of children who find arithmetic difficult, it is simply a matter of how the child processes information. Yet often homeschoolers find that at least one child has difficulty with math, and that they have hit a wall. Arithmetic operations are foundational to future math learning, so it is critical that kids master math facts. While these facts might seem like no-brainers to most of us, many children struggle mightily to learn, memorize, and understand basic arithmetic.

Right brain math flash cards