TOUCH MATH

It’s a controversial topic :) SOme people love it, other people say that it keeps the kids from understanding what they’re doing by reducing math to a motor ritual. I suspect that if you work hard to make sure they *also* learn the ideas, you can prevent that.

I taught seventh grade LD math and one year my class was just ‘way better at the basics of calculation… gosh, we could move on from two-digit addition and subtraction!!! I asked them about this weird habit they had of touching the numbers when they did problems on the board… they’d done TouchMath. Frankly, they learned more from me because they weren’t stuck at addition and subtraction — but I didnt try to use it for multiplication, etc., which I know some people do.

Math Facts the Fun Way from http://www.citycreek.com. This often works better than Touch Math — faster, the children enjoy it more, and it often “bridges” better to regular math computation.

The workbooks are reproducible, so you could get buy with just a tutoring set rather than a complete classroom set. The classroom manual of activities might be of interest to some classroom teachers, but really is not necessary if you are working with children individually or in small groups.

Mary

Math Facts the Fun Way is not good for those who have visualization problems or those who do not think visually. It was pure frustration for my son who has poor visual memory. He was ready to tear his hair out because its all about remembering images that helps you remember the facts. Just our experience.

I’m another person who is not convinced at all about “Math Facts The Fun Way”. For people like me with organizational deficits, ordering problems, and distractibility, trying to learn one simple fact by adding on a hundered distractors to it is an absolute disaster. I would never ever apply this program to entire classes or use it as a standard program, as some people have suggested; for a large group of students it would make the situation worse instead of better.

A question for Mary MN and the other supporters of this book: How long has it been out? How long have you used it? I would be very interested in knowing how your students who have learned this way progress in high school math and sciences.

Touch math worked great for my child. I was amazed at
how fast she learned addition once we started on this program.
I really recommend it.

TOUCHMATH has helped my dd incredibly with both addition and subtraction. She went from getting all the problems wrong (using fingers) to getting 99.9% of them correct.
Deb in FL

I purchased the addition/subtraction program for my 2 dds, and it hasn’t done anything for either of them. On the other hand, Touchmath helped my older LD daughter tremendously (see post below).

My son is not a strong visual learner either but we still found Multiplications Facts the Fun Way to be very useful. You can remember the story auditorally as well as visually and that is what my son did. I would remind him of the story auditorally as well.

The only A’s my son got on math all year were on his multiplication tables.

Beth

Hi,

I work at a community intergration facility for the handicapped and was wondering where I could order touch math. I work with higher functioning clients that would like to learn some math and I thought this program might help.

Thanks for your time,
Heather

This is great. It really helps.