Vol. 29 No. 1 Spring 2024 17 Supporting students with Dyscalculia in the maths classroom Louise Langford has kindly shared her ten top tips for helping Dyscalculic students develop their mathematical thinking. Please let us know yours and which of the ideas below you use and why? The aim is to collate and then publish an extensive list of strategies for use in supporting Dyscalculic students. I happened to be collaborating on something with Louise Langford (Dyscalculia Assessor and Teacher) and in the process, she kindly shared some tips she uses to help teachers support dyscalculic students. I am including her ideas below in the hope that you can add to the list, and we can begin to create a toolkit of approaches to supporting such students in the classroom. 1. Use concrete resources to introduce all new learning, modelling, and encouraging visual representation, as well as being aware that such pupils will need longer to connect to abstract symbols (Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract approach-CPA). 2. Specifically develop pictorial representations to support the expression of problems visually, rather than in purely symbolic form. 3. Build mathematical vocabulary, by explicitly teaching the language and symbols of mathematics alongside the CPA approach (connections/connected approach), creating linked key word and symbol cards or a maths wall for them to refer to. 4. Recognise that these pupils may need to be given the ‘tools to communicate’ and develop their mathematical thinking, alongside scaffolded language. 5. Develop and promote meta-cognition by allowing them to ‘think aloud’ when solving problems, building on their meta-cognitive strategies, evaluating their methods, and encouraging them to prove their answer in another way. 6. Model how you think and encourage students to jot down their thinking to keep track when dealing with two, or more, step problems. 7. Help them to estimate what their answer is likely to be and to look at their answer once they have completed the calculation to see if it is reasonable. 8. Teach and develop strategies to recall number facts, using what you know to work out what you don’t know i.e. generalising. Representations of ten are a key part of this and provide an effective way to transfer knowledge.
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