Carrie Cox’s Corner

Don’t we all need a helping hand sometimes? I know that I do. There are some multiplication facts that I still have to process before I blurt them out….stinking 7’s and 8’s….they haunt me still.

Well, working with children whose working memories are very limited in capacity, I’ve gotten really creative in ways to help them. One of these ways is with “helping hands.”

With my daughter we learned skip counting on her fingers. We used a washable marker and wrote down skip counting on her fingers for the number we were learning to multiply. For example four, so on her fingers, we wrote down 4….8….12…16…20 (then move to the right hand) 24…28….32…40.

She would practice looking at them and holding the fingers up and counting. She could look all she wanted to. It grew confidence. After this was mastered, we would turn her hands around so she couldn’t see the answer (or throw on a pair of gloves if they were handy). After she got to where she could say them consecutively, then we made the connection that the number of fingers you were holding up was what you were multiplying the number 4 by. Once she memorized the answers in place, she just had to visualize the correct finger and she was able to remember the answer. She always struggled with memory work, so this process seemed to really open the door for her. She does better than I do now at multiplying.

My boy Hunter on the other hand was a harder nut to crack. He has a hard time with fine motor skills, so holding up a specific finger one at a time was a separate and just as hard task as trying to remember the sequence. So with him we decided he needed “a helping hand.”

The Dollar tree had a pack of blank/white hand cut outs, and we used those as our helping hands.

I folded each one down around the knuckle zone, so he could fold them down as he counted, but we found that he was able to work through the process just by looking at it. We even practiced visualizing the hands and specific fingers as he was silently counting in his head. It made such a difference for his ability to complete a multiplication quiz. I plan on laminating a set and putting it together on a ring so he can keep them in his desk to use to help him with doing math facts.

Using my iPad and pencil was also a really fun way for him to complete these work sheets. I found a few free printable on teachers pay teachers and downloaded them to Goodnotes. After he completed it, I could grade it with another color, erase the wrong answers, and he could correct them. I can also reset the page, so he could do the page again. No paper or printer or ink refills needed!The first time he did the page without an assistance, just reviewing out loud before we started, he completed this work sheet in four minutes. Four minutes, and there were a few errors. After we got out the hands and reviewed the process, the very second try he was right at two minutes, so it really seemed to help his focus by having a visual process to convert counting by three’s into multiplying by three’s.