What every child needs, primarily, is a working knowledge of the four rules: addition, subtraction, mutiplication and division.'New maths' attempts to explain to children 'why' the arithmetic functions work alongside learning 'how', but many children find the explanations tedious and confusing and the result is to muddle them completely, creating in some cases 'dyscalculia' (the number version of dyslexia), or, more often, a fear or dislike of the subject. The basic arithmetical skills are amongst that group of subjects learnt most quickly and easily by the majority of children if direct and explicit instruction is given. The programme needs to be systematic, multi-sensory, cumulative and thorough.

Ability in maths is strongly related to reading difficulties with 40% of errors on maths achievement tests found to be due to reading errors. Schools that take up the synthetic phonic reading principles wholeheartedly find that maths scores rise throughout the school in addition to the reading scores.

'…in Clackmannanshire the teachers found that when the synthetic-phonics-taught children went into the second year at school, they needed to go up a level in the Maths scheme, that is, one level above what would normally be used. This was thought to be a direct effect of the children coping better with the reading requirements of the maths scheme.'
(Prof Rhona Johnson, personal communication to J.Colby. http://johncolby.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/maths-and-grades/)

'I would like my students to learn the basic facts so well that conscious thought is no longer exhausted on them. No sense wasting a child's imagination and independence on such trivialities... In my experience it has not been the children who have drilled and learned the facts who hate math, but the ones who have not. They, therefore, find every simple problem requires tremendous effort; and more often than not answers are wrong because of a lack of ready control of the facts.' (Carle)

http://mathpath.com/booklet.htm Jerry Schnell's free, online booklet: Why your child can't understand maths.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI Video: Maths Education -an inconvenient truth.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a81YvrV7Vv8&mode=related&search= Video: Doing subtraction using New Maths :-)

www.teachernet.gov.uk/teachers/issue42/primary/features/Mathsmisconceptions/ Maths Misconceptions

www.counton.org/numberland/ Click on a number from the magic square to go to a page all about that number

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