Math Strategies for Students with Intellectual Disparities

When children have experience weaker cognitive abilities, they likely will struggle across all academic areas. Math achievement  and visual-spatial reasoning skills tend to be positively related to each other. In other words, if you client has low cognitive abilities, with weak visual-spatial reasoning, math may be particularly challenges. It will be important to focus on practical, concrete, and applied mathematical skills.

For Example:

  •  Learning math through cooking, shopping, building, sports and other similar applied skills will help build his motivation for math and increase the usefulness of these skills in their lives. 
  • Learning math with tangible manipulatives will help to make learning more concrete for clients (e.g. use actual coins/dollars when learning money rather than pictures or only words, use blocks or abacus when calculating sums). 
  • Encourage the use of a calculator when the focus is on problem-solving.
  • Consider use of the abacus for math; it brings the abstract and arbitrary nature of pencil-and-paper math to concrete counting. More than manipulatives, an abacus is systematic and teaches concepts, unlike calculators.

The following strategies and steps can also be utilized:

  • Use concrete manipulatives (counters, buttons, etc.) for math.  When using paper, have your client draw shapes (e.g., circles or stars) on the page to represent each number that they are using. They can also cross off each one as he/she counts them.
  • Teach your client basic patterning skills, beginning with concrete objects or pictures (e.g., Star-Moon-Star-Moon-, or Cat-Dog-Cat-Dog-).  Next, move to number patterns (e.g., 1-2-1-2-1-2-).  Use manipulatives whenever possible.
  • Break an operation into steps, and use cue cards with symbols or words representing subsequent steps in arithmetic operations (e.g., first step, second step, etc.).  This will then provide a guide for students to follow when doing math calculations or solving word problems.

Development of Number Sense

Emphasize the development of a number sense:

■ Begin with the manipulation of real objects, sorting, and rearranging different collections. Identify the “3” buttons.

■ Emphasize that a particular number of objects has a fixed value despite the size or nature of those objects

■ Practice counting by 2, 5, and 10s.  Start at different numbers and write out the pattern, (e.g., 13, 23, 33, 43)

■ Use beads or cubes as visual aids when adding and subtracting. Have your client write out formula (e.g., 5 – 2 = 3)

■ Gradually reduce the visual aids. Move from using concrete materials to pictorial representation to numbers.

Additional Resources

Your client will need extra practice and review to solidify basic math facts and concepts (i.e., drill and practice with multiplication tables).