Stephanie Landis (00:06):

Hello and welcome to UnBabbled, a podcast that navigates the world of special education, communication, delays and learning differences. We are your host, Stephanie Landis and Meredith Krimmel, and we’re certified speech language pathologist who spend our days at the parish school in Houston helping children find their voices and connect with the world around them.

(00:26):

For my family, Tex-Mex is the way to go. It pleases everyone in the family, and that is one of the reasons we are so excited to have this episode sponsored by the original Mexican Cafe. The original Mexican cafe is the longest continually operating restaurant on Galveston Island, still at its original location. It’s located on the corner of 14th and Market in Galveston’s, beautiful historic district. They have two stories of dining area perfect for casual dining, business lunches, large groups, or a night out on the town. They also offer a full bar and catering. To learn more about the original Mexican cafe, visit their website at www.theoriginalgalveston.com or come and visit them in person for some delicious Tex-Mex. Your family will leave happy as well. Gateway Academy is a unique school in Houston, Texas, serving sixth through 12th grade students with academic and social challenges. Gateway’s committed to teaching traditional academics while also meeting the social and emotional needs of their students with learning and social differences.

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Over the last 15 years, their work has been to provide students with opportunities for identity exploration, learning, self-awareness, and practicing self-advocacy, opening a path to personal significance in college, career and community. For more information, visit their website at www.thegatewayacademy.org. In this episode, we speak with dyslexia specialist Marilyn Zucker about using her expertise and experience as a certified academic language therapist to teach math. Marilyn has been in the field of dyslexia education since 1976. She’s a master’s in education and is the first Orton-Gillingham fellow in mathematics. Marilyn specializes in teaching educators how to use a multi-sensory approach in their math classes. During our chat, Marilyn explains what it means to teach. Using a multi-sensory approach discusses the intersection of language and mathematics and tells us why it is so important to use real world learning experiences. She also gives parents and educators specific multisensory math activities they can implement today to make learning more concrete and fun for their students.

Stephanie Landis (02:43):

Welcome. On our episode today we have Marilyn Zecher here. She’s going to talk to us about using multisensory learning to teach math, and I am so excited about this. Math is usually not my jam or area expertise, but the more I learn about the intersection of language and math, the more excited I find myself getting about math. So welcome. We’re so excited to talk to you today.

Marilyn Zecher (03:08):

I’m so happy to be here. So

Stephanie Landis (03:09):

You started out with a background in reading? Yes,

Marilyn Zecher (03:13):

Actually, I started out as a music teacher.

Stephanie Landis (03:15):

Oh, wow.

Marilyn Zecher (03:17):

And when they started firing music teachers because they needed more classroom teachers for other subjects, I didn’t have the tenure, so I said, well, maybe I better shore up the foundations here. So I got a second bachelor’s and master’s degree in reading in English rather. And then I was teaching both reading and math, English and math at the middle school level. I moved to the high school level teaching only English. And when I left the classroom, I was still a demonstration teacher for an Orton-Gillingham based literacy program in a public school. So I had as much as a third of the school in my reading classes because anyone who was reading one or more years below grade level was in my class. They weren’t necessarily labeled as learning disabled, they were just needing phonics instruction. So I taught that for a number of years. So after teaching music, I moved to English and then my husband and I traveled for a while, and when I came back I was using my Orton-Gillingham training to teach English and study skills, and I discovered that many of my high school and middle school students were failing algebra.

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So I sought out professionals to get additional training in math. I worked with Dr. Joyce Steves both in a study skill practicum and in the math course, and I kept saying, Dr. Steves, you have to take this to algebra. And when she didn’t, I did. So a little over 20 years ago, I began teaching the first multisensory math classes at our learning center, which is a nonprofit.

Stephanie Landis (04:46):

Can you for anybody who’s not as familiar, explain what it means to be multisensory in learning?

Marilyn Zecher (04:53):

I think I can try to put that in a succinct way, but we learn through various, we would call them neurocognitive processes. We know sitting in a classroom, the teacher’s talking, so we’re getting auditory input. We’re visually seeing what the teachers in the old days putting on the blackboard or the dry erase board. Now it’s the smart board, but we learn auditorily. So we’re learning through our ears, but we’re finding that many students really do well when they use their hands in learning. Because you’re integrating so many sensory areas, you’re actually building sensory information and memories in different parts of the brain. So for example, when my husband went out and said, I helped you, I know you’re going to put a new alternator on the car, I took the old one off and I said, you can’t do that because if I don’t take it off, I don’t know where the wires go.

(05:45):

So I’m pretty good mechanically, but I need to do it with my hands. But once you do it with your hands, you remember. And so we’ve talked about visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic. For those of you who are not familiar with those words, we’re learning by seeing, we’re learning by hearing when other people are telling us we’re learning by doing following procedures. But one thing we never think to mention is that we talk to ourselves. Do you talk to yourself? I talk to myself all the time. I talk to my washing machine, my stove, what do I have to put in the recipe next? That piece is verbal. So you’re saying it while you’re doing it, you’re creating a language memory in the brain or you’re moderating what you do. So one psychologist I love to reference, she says, oh, doing word problems and doing lots of things in math.

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It’s like trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner in a camper. There’s only so much room and so much space and too many things going on. So when we are self moderating what we’re doing, we’re keeping place of where we are, we’re talking to ourselves. Language has an incredible impact on math. We calculate how many of us still count on our fingers, all of us count on our fingers at one time or another. We want to obviously not do that for big calculations, but when you’re using all your sensory areas, you’re learning more. Now, I haven’t figured out how to teach anything with smell yet. Maybe chemistry, but not for math or English. But in fact, the sense of smell, our olfactory system is the strongest sensory modality we have. Now, the key to multisensory is that you’re using as many multisensory areas as you can at the same time because they’re integrated in the brain and they create memories.

(07:38):

So a lot of what I do in math involves what we call gross motor. When you want to tell the quarterback how he should throw a football, you don’t just tell him and expect him to do it, he has to put the football in his hand and launch that puppy down the field. And so the act of doing while you’re thinking about it, while you’re seeing, while you’re hearing, creates stronger memories in the brain. And the key to multisensory math is having our students build things. So we’ll be talking about that today, but multisensory means using all your sensory areas at the same time in learning. Not we’re going to see it today and do it tomorrow, but we’re going to do it all at the same time.

Meredith Krimmel (08:21):

And you talked about your Orton-Gillingham training. When you receive that, that’s for people who dunno, that’s really more about reading. And you were finding that there really wasn’t the same kind of instruction module or training for math, is that

Marilyn Zecher (08:34):

That’s correct. I mean, so you have to understand, I did my Orton-Gillingham training back before the dinosaurs. There was no A-O-G-P-E. There was no Academy of Orton-Gillingham practitioners. There were no fellows, no associates, no training sequence. You just worked with somebody who had worked with somebody who had worked with someone who was a member of the original group. So I was very fortunate. I did my OG training in the, we call it OG for Orton-Gillingham. For those parents out there who don’t know Samuel t Orton was a psychologist who identified dyslexia as a learning difference. He tasked his research assistant Anna Gillingham with devising methods for teaching students to read who previously had not been successful. He called it word blindness. So multisensory goes back a very long way. It goes back to Maria Montessori who opened her first children’s center in 1906 I think, or 1907.

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But there’s a difference in methodology where some methods of teaching with multisensory are more discovery. Go out and see what you want to learn and let’s follow you and do some guided instruction. The Orton-Gillingham methodology is more an explicit model of instruction. I say I want to teach this skill and how can I teach it using all sensory areas. So there are differences and there are a lot of ways they correlate, but there are also ways they’re very different. So my Orton-Gillingham training was in the seventies and then following along as this developed and we discovered that yes, indeed children do need phonics when they’re learning to read. How we do that becomes an approach or a methodology. OG has been around since the 1940s. It just didn’t have that name. Dr. Joyce Steves was an Orton fellow. Once the academy was established, one of the early pioneers of using og, she taught at a school in Baltimore with one of our major researchers who’s still around today, Steve Chen, and they worked on developing some multisensory math strategies, but nothing was formal.

(10:46):

Dr. Steves did generate a course before she retired, which I took and worked with her and then also worked with her as a fellow. She was also trained in reading, but there was no formal multisensory math. There was no manual, there was no binder, nothing told us what to teach, just, oh, you want to use multisensory Now, Dr. Steves did develop a lesson plan and that has, she’s given me permission to use her work. So she was one of the first and hardly to me, a past president of the International Dyslexia Association worked with her as well to create some of their pamphlets, but I think there was no formal multisensory approach to math. And so people had this feeling that reading was here and math was there and they really didn’t have much to do with each other. Well now we’re finding, because we have tools called neuroscience now we’re finding that they have a lot to do with each other. And so when you’re working at home with your child or your tutoring or your teaching, the more you can involve in those visual and tactile representations and tactile means touch, tactile and visual representations, the more the students are going to learn. And then let’s pair that with the instructional language. And that’s what I’m really known for because I’ve tried to marry the best practices in math with our instructional strategies that are either research informed or evidence-based

Stephanie Landis (12:15):

To me, especially as the children get older, math moves from being so concrete of like, here’s one apple and here’s one apple into it becoming very abstract. And I think that using the multisensory approach is such a great way of taking that abstract and making it really concrete for the kids to be able to wrap their heads around.

Marilyn Zecher (12:36):

And that’s actually what I do because I am so grounded in multisensory. So I take it, that was my impetus for working with Dr. Steves. And I said, Joyce, you do a really nice job of telling us that we have to use all sensory areas, but you haven’t taken it to algebra and I need algebra. And when she didn’t take it there I did. So yes, we can say what are three apples and two apples? I can say, what are 200 packs of Reese’s Pieces plus 300 packs of Reese’s pieces, and we have to relate that to 500 packs of Reese’s pieces, but I also do it at the algebraic level. So when I’m training secondary teachers and we’re doing slope intercept form, which is the ground floor of algebra, and I say, let’s have the students reason mathematically and we build what’s the appropriate slope for a handicap ramp, and we have the students reason mathematically with that, we have to bring it down to real life applications.

(13:35):

One of my colleagues the other day was teaching quadratic functions, which maybe you don’t remember that from high school, but that’s the U-shaped graph. And she had her students replicating how the black death came to Europe and it was the Mongols laying siege to a castle and they had bubonic plague and they couldn’t get into the castle to defeat the Italians who were there. So they began launching the bodies of plague victims into the castle with a trier or a catapult. And so her students built catapults and they hurled fake bodies into the castle to see the trajectory of the parabola and its maximum height and what they had to do to calculate to get that trier to fling that body into the castle. They’re never going to forget that, but that’s algebra and then the water fountain is just another parabola, and if it is too broad, it overshoots the bowl and there’s water all over the floor. Getting students to visualize that abstract math is key to making it memorable and also relevant.

Stephanie Landis (14:39):

Do you have some go-to, especially in the elementary levels, ways of making things more hands-on and multisensory moment?

Marilyn Zecher (14:49):

Absolutely. We have a lot of neurological evidence now and that started for those of you who may know that there’s a big push now for science of reading in classrooms both in public and independent schools and homeschooling as well. And so when we talk about the structure and sounds or phonology of the English language, we know that that’s key to helping students be prepared for reading. Along with that, we are also talking about how can we make quantities and our concepts in math more recognizable. We now know that math begins in the human brain before language is acquired, the child in the high chair is differentiating more or fewer. My brother got two more cookies than I did, or how many Cheerios are on the high chair tray? This bunch has more. And so visualizing quantities is the earliest part of math along with the language of math.

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So for those of you who have young children at home, you need to be talking about math words like more same, different takeaway, greater than, do you have more than this? Which pile is more that Fisher-Price? Ring Tower is doing a math activity of putting things in order from greatest to least matching things the same and different is huge, bigger, smaller, taller, shorter, all of those words that you use with your child in early childhood, those are preparing them for formal arithmetic. So that’s the first thing. And put those apples and cheerios on the high chair tray and point out three Cheerios. Do you want two cookies? Use number words with them. I see for instance, a lot of parents know how important counting is, and so what they will do is toss a ball between the child. I saw this last weekend with my family in Maine just tossing the ball and counting, and you might as well be counting in Turkish because the language doesn’t mean anything unless you’re counting objects with young children.

(16:59):

And so counting things, counting objects, laying them next to a number line or a ruler, bake with your children. I remember baking brownies with my mother at four years old cutting brownies into how many parts did we get out of that pan? Let’s count them. How many cookies do you want to eat? How many cookies did you eat? I mean, we have all those things you do with children measuring cups. For Pete’s sakes, it deals with fractions. The more you expose your children to math and daily lives, the better it is for the child. But the counting needs to be associated with objects and or number lines for them to see that we are linking those words and numerals to representing a quantity. Then once we do that, as we’re working young children, our kindergarten standard is automatic addition and subtraction within five. So counting on fingers to five fingers, putting two hands together to make 10.

(18:00):

Those are some of your early, early lessons. Then we start with something that’s called subitizing. Now subitizing is automatic recognition of quantity without counting. It’s also estimating which is greater in a pile of dots or candies than another pile. Learning to count and see differences between quantities, learning dice patterns for children is really important. But also recognizing that the human brain can tell numbers up to four items without counting everything. After that, we need to either organize in my interpretation of the data we need to recognize patterns, like knowing that five is that five, four in a square and one in the middle. Punching that middle. If you want to clap the pattern of five, being able to tell the difference between the dice pattern of five and six, there are two levels of subitizing and so with our young children, we’re working with those lower numbers up to about five, maybe the dice pattern of six.

(19:05):

And then after that we have a second level. That one is called perceptual. What you see, what you perceive and recognize. The second level is when we put two quantities together, like recognizing two and three and oh, that adds up to five when we put them together. So when you play dice games with your children even rolling two dice and trying to tell the total quantity, those are huge for children. Once we get past five and we build to 10, I like to build the place value system with craft sticks. There are many reasons. I have a lot of educators who say, oh, well I use coffee stirs because they’re not as heavy or bulky or anything. And I say, well, you’re missing the point. In our educational system, we do a poor job of teaching magnitude. In many schools just when students start to write and read big numbers, we take away the manipulatives, the concrete objects, and so we want them convenient and lightweight for our convenience, but that doesn’t help children understand what a thousand looks like.

(20:12):

And so until students understand addition and subtraction with regrouping, I use crafts sticks and ponytail elastics because rubber bands dry out and break and they’re dangerous. I shoot them when I use those four millimeter ponytail elastics, which I buy in bulk and I’ve been known to buy as many as 55,000 crafts sticks in a year for classes I teach. I try to give my practitioners the tools they need to teach the math. We never use manipulatives without a place value mat. And believe it or not, it’s easy to make. It’s called either Microsoft Word or Google Docs. It’s table two rows, two columns, and then you make the top row say ones and tens and then you use your craft sticks on the bigger boxes. You put your ones down in tallies four with one across, and when you get two tallies we bundle and now it’s a 10 and I don’t need to count it again because I recognize it.

(21:13):

So introducing two digit numbers, which is what we do in first grade kindergarten. We build the teen numbers and count to 20. We’ll talk about that in a minute. And then in first grade we build to a hundred. And so I really like craft sticks. They’re inexpensive, they’re easy to replace, you’re careful with them. I use colored plastics all one color for within 100. And then we build 10 bundles of 10 when we get to 100. I can still remember a young child saying to the teacher, are we ever going to get to a hundred? And she looked at him with a straight pace and said, not in your lifetime. Well, within two weeks they were at a hundred and building a hundred and it was like a huge celebration day. We got to a hundred and then when you get to second grade or third grade, you can start building that bundle of a thousand craft sticks.

(22:04):

One of the teachers wrote to me and she said, I gave them the bundle of a hundred and then I asked them to figure out what they thought 1000, how big it might be. And this is where I feel strongly that we need to have good representations of magnitude. The size of a quantity a thousand craft sticks for a child is heavy and they need to know that big quantities of things are heavy mass is part of what we study in terms of magnitude. So I love working with crafts sticks and parents can find that very, very easily to use, easy to use and children love it and it makes math fun. And so we build two digit numbers and we put them on the mat and we say, what is this number made of? Oh, it’s made of two tens and three ones. So what is its name?

(22:56):

And we touch the craft sticks as we say 23. We touch the two tens when we say 20 and the three ones when we say three. And so I’ve used that to build until our students understand addition and subtraction with regrouping. So what I just talked about is a term called simultaneous processing. I’m going to say that again. Simultaneous processing. While you’re touching it, while you’re seeing it, you’re describing it, therefore you’re speaking it and hearing it and you’re linking those memories in the brain. And so now when I say to you, what do you think 33 is made of? Now I can pull up that mental image of three tens, three ones on the mat that helps with calculating. So for parents out there, if you were raised in the dark ages like I was and we said borrow and carry, we’re getting rid of those words, they have left the building with Elvis.

(24:00):

And so we are now saying composing and decomposing quantities, you have 10 craft sticks in your the one’s place. What do we do? We bundle our 10, we compose a 10 and put it in the ten’s place. We talk in adult words to children and we don’t always understand that. We say place and we say value, but we never define it. And so what is your place at the dining room table? Do you always sit in that chair for the family dinner? That’s your place. We relate it to what little children understand and know. And so the place for the ones is in this box and the place for the tens is in that box because they’re already bundled. I don’t have to count them again and I recognize what they look like when second grade, when we move on, then we can transition to the base 10 blocks and those are plastic or foam blocks with a big cube that’s 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters the size of a square cube gift box. And that’s a thousand of those little tiny cubes. But I like my students to encounter a thousand craft sticks first because it really impresses them. Yeah, I

Stephanie Landis (25:15):

Saw a video where you were using them and it still made a huge impact on me. It’s huge.

Marilyn Zecher (25:21):

It’s huge

Stephanie Landis (25:22):

And fun.

Marilyn Zecher (25:23):

And it’s fun. And I have a lot of parents who take my course as well or they take my workshops and they’ll say the craft sticks were a game changer. We’ve had fourth and fifth graders who never really understood what the place value system was and what it meant. And it’s just recognition of quantity without counting, but in larger values. And so building the place value system. One activity I love in schools is we build the 1 million cube. Oh wow. And you can build it with PVC pipe. I do it with base 10 blocks and then rope. So I have children hold the corners that’s basically a little more than a yard. It’s one meter by one meter by one meter, and then another child stands in the middle of it and they get to be one in a million. And I’ve had schools build it with PVC pipe and when a child is the student of the day or something, they get to go to the library in front of the board and get photographed as one in a million.

(26:22):

So anytime we can make children feel competent and feel like they’re capable and they understand the math because they can build to describe it and name it, it’s huge for them. It builds confidence and it’s fun. Some of my schools go out on the playground with rope and they’ll lay out the outline of the 1 billion cube. So we can have a lot of fun with math and build quantities and then link it to real life experiences. So anytime you’re doing things with your students or your children and you’re having them touch it, let them cook with you, let them build things with you, show them what you can do Well with measurement and time. As a child, I used to navigate roadmaps and I can remember sitting in the backseat and telling my father, you’re going to turn right on Route 28. And they empowered me with that. So even though there were times I didn’t feel confident in math coming through school, I had all those actual authentic applications and experiences with math with my parents, and it was tremendously empowering.

Stephanie Landis (27:32):

One of the things that you touched on that I really gleam too as a speech pathologist is you were talking about the new language, it’s composing and decomposing. And when you were talking about the younger kids, you were talking about the language. I think that another connection between math and language is that there is so many words that we use to describe math that sometimes our kids with language disorders, we need to make sure that we are directly teaching them like you were exactly decomposing and composing means we’re bringing them together, we’re taking

Marilyn Zecher (28:04):

Them apart. And I noticed

Stephanie Landis (28:05):

Physically feel what decomposing and composing means.

Marilyn Zecher (28:08):

You see this on the podcast, but what you’re doing is using your hands. And that is so perfect because you’re modeling that when we compose, we’re adding, we’re putting together, and you put your hands together. And when we take away, that’s our first iteration of subtraction and we use our hands. And so modeling with your hands. So if parents out there, if you could imagine I’m putting my right hand out, no opposite you. So you’re going to think my left hand and I’m saying that 11 is made of one 10 and one one. And just think of that for a moment. It’s made of a group of 10, a bundle of 10 and one, one, and I want to make five groups of 11. I make five groups of the 10. I can see that in my mind and I call it its name is 50.

(28:58):

Then I make five groups of the one and I put my other hand out. So I’m modeling with my students the manipulation and thinking part of the math reasoning. So imagine playing Simon says, geometry with your child, and you say, Simon says, show me a straight line. And they put their arms straight out on either side. Then you say, Simon says, show me a right angle. And they put one arm right in the air. Oh, that was so good. Now show me an acute angle, a cute little angle. Now you have to sit down. I didn’t say Simon says, but an acute angle is less than 90 degrees. So they’re going to bring their arms over to show a smaller angle. Can you find a right angle in your house? Could you point out some right angles that where the corners come together, there’s a corner.

(29:52):

Our houses are filled with right angles, our roofs are filled with two angles. So using whole body, and that’s another thing that is a multisensory strategy for you parents out there. It’s called gross motor activities. Many parents don’t realize that preschool and kindergarten children do not have the musculature to hold a pencil. We’ve seen those big fat pencils, they give the little kids. Our students do much better with big fat dry erase markers and a dry erase board. Well, when you make those numerals, we need to make sure as parents that we don’t teach them anything inaccurate to start with because when you teach them something wrong, it’s harder to undo it. That’s very important. So when we make our numerals, there’s a directionality and sequence that we use. So for example, the numeral two starts at that hook on the two and we say make an ear and go across, make an ear and go across, make an ear and go across.

(31:01):

That’s the numeral two. When you do numerals like that, using large motor memory, pointing in the air and making it, we call it skywriting in Orton-Gillingham, we teach them not only what the numeral looks like, what its name is, how many it is when we get to two on a number line, but we also teach the directionality and sequence of forming the numerals before we ever put a pencil in their hands so that when we’re doing it in very large sizes, you’re making that numeral too, like a stick in the dirt. You’re doing something. I like to make it with puffy paint on card stock or on tag board. And I make my numerals and I have my children trace it in three dimensions before they write. That’s multisensory. So that when a child recognizes the numeral three or the numeral five, you know that five is one of the ones that is the biggest mistake.

(32:02):

When we teach it in one continuous stroke, by the time they get to algebra, it becomes an S. So we say down and around, put the top hat on, down and around, put the top hat on and we sing it. My favorite is the numeral nine because when I get to numeral nine, instead of saying round the balloon and down the stick, which is like ordinary, I say rot, apple on a stick rot nap on a stick rut, apple on a stick, that’s numeral nine. And then I say to the class, who wants to be nine today? And seven hands go up, they get to sing it like a monster. But having them do the directionality and sequence, which by the way is a great time for me to mention the directionality and sequence with which we do math operations and math problems is critical for them.

(32:54):

So we have students who just see two numbers and they add all the time. So I say to my students, name the sign, follow the line, this is where we begin and we go to the top of the numerals and we add going down. So that nationality and sequence is very important and I see that manifested later when we get to multiplication and division. So we have to understand all aspects of our calculations. The mental part, the language part, it’s complicated, it’s really complicated. And a lot of parents come and say, why can’t you just teach them to do the problems like I did in the old days in practice and drill? Well, we could, but we now know that it’s better if they understand what they’re doing. So right now, if I were to ask you to visualize the number 17 and tell me what it’s made of, it’s made of one ten seven ones.

(33:56):

And then I asked you what would three times 10 be? And you would say, and think in your mind, those three bundles of 10 sticks and you’d say, oh, it’s 30. And then if we’re learning multiplication and we say three groups of seven is 21, I can put 30 and 21 together and I now know my 17 times table, I can reason mathematically. I don’t have to just memorize, which for parents out there and teachers, I really want you to know that some of the neuroscience where we track what changes are going on in the brain when children do things, we can learn a lot of our addition and subtraction facts with math patterns, visual patterns and linking them to numerals. That’s why playing games is so important for little kids. You’re playing things where you roll dice and you move a certain number of steps, shoots and ladders and those kinds of things.

(34:51):

They’re very, very good for kids. But what we now know about multiplication is that it’s language dependent. I like to say in my workshops I’ll say to parents or participants, I want you to name the 13 American colonies. And they look at me as if I’m crazy and I say, yeah, if I were to ask you to do that, the first thing you would do is construct a mental map of the East coast of the United States and you would start working your way down that mental map. You’re visualizing to pull up the words. It’s word retrieval. Well, there is no map for seven times eight is 56. And so if multiplication facts are difficult, especially for our students with language-based, they’re the children who walk around with word retrieval issues. Stephanie, I’m sure you’ve heard this, I need that thing. I knew that every day thing you dry your hair with one of my high school students said that, mom, I need that thing you dry your hair with.

(35:51):

She couldn’t pull up the word hairdryer. Word retrieval is very difficult for some of our children. Those are the children who may struggle with multiplication facts. So we have to find alternative strategies for teaching those and developing fluency. And I would usher in a plea to you parents out there. Please, please, please do not ask the school to give your child a calculator too early. Imagine if we took a third grader who’s not reading well and said, that’s it. We’re just going to stop trying to teach reading, give them talking books. We would never do that. And the calculator is a great tool. We all use it and I advocate using it, but if we use it exclusively, we are abrogating our responsibility for teaching our students the facts they need for math reasoning. Trust me, I’m a dyslexia specialist. I am all about accommodations.

(36:48):

But there are things that teachers can do to really help our children learn those math facts. So for example, I can take four products or answers in one times table or some pattern in the Times table and I can say, these are the numbers we’re working on this week. We’re not going to overload your verbal memory. We’re going to work on just these four facts and we’re going to write them at the beginning of class. We’re going to create what I call a near point reference. It’s on the desk, they can see it and use it. And then we’re going to use those facts six ways to Sunday for the entire math period every day for five days. So we teach fewer facts at a time to develop fluency over time. One of the worst things you can do is just drill with flashcards. They’re great for maintenance, but they’re not good for teaching.

(37:43):

Teaching is where we use our math facts and we make our students reason with those math facts. Now, one of the things people see in my training is that use of music, my earlier music training, we know for example, that Alzheimer’s patients who don’t even recognize the faces of their own children can sing and dance to the songs they learned in high school. Music and rhythm has a very, very strong memory source in the brain. So when I say to students, two times six and 2 12, 4 times six and 4 24, 6 times 6, 6 36 and eight times six ends an 8 48, let’s all practice that together. Let’s look at it while we practice it. Let’s write it while we practice it. There’s your multisensory. Now let’s use it in problem solving in calculations. And I know that there’s a big controversy going on right now in the math community and that’s something else I want to address for parents and teachers.

(38:49):

Are drills constructive or are they not constructive? Do they develop anxiety in our learning disabled children or do they not? And so there’s a big contingent in the math community and in evidence we have the What Works clearinghouse practice guide that says timed drills work and they do, but they do cause problems for children who have language-based disabilities. They can cause anxiety and feelings of fear and failure in mathematics. So if we’re going to use time drills, we need to use them humanely. We do not have students grading each other’s papers. We do not say we’ll have a pizza party when the whole class achieves fluency. We do not use punitive methods to punish children and make them feel inadequate because they’re taking longer to learn timestables than other children. Now we can use a time drill where the child does the drill every day for a week, the same one, and records their progress, what they’ve gained and they can be proud of making progress.

(39:54):

And just as I’m short, I want to tell you at the grocery store, I cultivate tall friends and I will say, may I borrow your tallness to reach this thing on the top shelf? We all have different strengths and it’s part of our diversity, which is nice. We’re good at different things. So some of us will take longer to learn our multiplication facts than others. So if you’re a teacher teach multiplication and division at the same time so they see the connection, don’t wait to teach division and say, oh, now we’re learning our division facts. Why do we need to learn the timestables twice? They were tough enough the first time. So we’re going to illustrate that with using linking cubes and building patterns, building groups of three in different colors with unifix cubes or even craft sticks and counting by threes. Counting is skip Counting is important, but we don’t want our children skip counting forever. That’s a tool that gets us to fluency. So parents and teachers need to spend a lot of time and they need to exert a lot of effort. Finding the best way to teach multiplication and division fluency without punishing children or making them feel like failures.

Meredith Krimmel (41:06):

I mean, you have had so many wonderful tips just in this conversation and I’m glad you brought up the music part because that was immediately what I thought when you started singing all the songs about number formation and how do you teach them the songs before they even ever put a pencil to paper, because we know

Marilyn Zecher (41:22):

Direction. You have a making numerals and letters before you ever put a pencil in their hand.

Meredith Krimmel (41:26):

And we know that music access is a different part of the brain. A speech language pathologist, we know that. And you’re accessing so many different parts. You have them up moving, you have them touching different textures. You talked about the foam paint. You have them singing and making

Marilyn Zecher (41:41):

Them silly putty, making numerals and silly putty or Play-Doh and then trace the shape of it. You can do a lot to learn numbers. You could be playing with your child, Play-Doh at the kitchen table while you’re cooking dinner and say, make the numeral two now show me two balls of Play-Doh. Make the numeral five now show me five balls of Play-Doh and put them in the dice pattern of five. Here’s a D, look at it, find five. These are all easy and fun activities

Meredith Krimmel (42:10):

And you make it so concrete in real life, which I think is a huge takeaway for me from this because I remember learning my multiplication facts and feeling like it was magic or memory and never really someone fully sitting down and explaining the concept. So then when someone did, it was like, oh, this is not magic. I could figure this out and just really making

Marilyn Zecher (42:30):

Real life. Yeah, it’s not just words I have to memorize. It’s not. It has meaning to it.

Meredith Krimmel (42:39):

Yeah.

Marilyn Zecher (42:40):

Make those groups of five. With craft sticks, you can take a clock, a clock face, the parents will know lots of kids don’t know how to read a clock, and you can put a tally of five craft sticks between the numerals and count by fives and show why it’s 30 minutes when we get to the six.

Stephanie Landis (42:58):

I love using clocks to help teach the concept of time and math and other things. We end up using dry erase markers on the clock all the time to show absolutely time passing and fractions of an hour and making

Marilyn Zecher (43:12):

It relevant. One of the favorite things I do for that, Stephanie, is I get a round tablecloth and I have the students, I have them build a clock with post-it notes, I show them a clock, I get a let ’em get on the floor and build a clock, put the one-to-one correspondence matching where the numerals are, and then we stand in the middle of the clock where the hands are and their arms become the hands of the clock and they swing from both hands being at 12, swing one hand to the six and say That’s a half an hour. Especially those kids who need to get up and move.

Meredith Krimmel (43:45):

Most kids,

Marilyn Zecher (43:46):

Most kids

Meredith Krimmel (43:46):

Need to get up and move.

Stephanie Landis (43:48):

I think that’s also, especially here at Parish where our kids have language disorders or learning differences, they get so bogged down and that learning is hard and that math is hard or these things are hard. And not only are you making it concrete that way and getting their whole body into it, but you’re like, math is fun. There’s real life applications. Let’s fling things. Let’s make a catapult, let’s fling it. It’s fun. Let’s be a clock.

Marilyn Zecher (44:17):

And I hear that all the time from people taking my class and they’ll say, my students come in now and they say, is math over already? Or they’ll say, can we have more time with math today? And you want to do a lot of reasoning and problem solving, but the evidence and for those teachers out there get to know the what works clearinghouse practice guides. You can just do a simple Google search on what works. You don’t have to do a lot of investigative work because each practice guide at the front of it, it tells you what instructional strategies are. Evidence-based. So you look at those for math, there’s teaching math to young children. There’s one on teaching math to students who struggle. Then you’re going to interpret that as to how you can use those strategies in the classroom. But I think it’s also good for teachers to know that when they will sort through as many as several thousand studies, get it down to maybe a hundred to 150, they think offer really good evidence that something works.

(45:16):

And then they grade the evidence as strong evidence, moderate or weak evidence to support using that strategy. So when you say there’s strong evidence to support something like in word problems in math, we now know that one of the problems with children who have disabilities doing word problems isn’t necessarily decoding. Everybody thinks, oh, it’s the reading. Well, reading is a broad topic. Lots of things go into reading. Oral language develops prosody saying a sentence, a speech pathologist. You’ll know having a child say a complete sentence with meaning and inflection and feeling well, they need to do that when they read silently. So doing the word problems and stopping at the period and understanding what that first sentence actually says. And is there anything I could draw? So in word problems, we now know that if a child can draw a picture, they can solve a problem, but we’re too busy having them find out what to do with the numbers that are in the word problem.

(46:19):

If they can visualize it and draw it, they can often solve it sometimes without doing any calculations. So we know that. The other thing is that for reading comprehension, another big culprit is called working memory. And that’s the memory of language you can hold in your brain long enough to act on it. It’s the reason our basic phone numbers have seven digits. We know that that’s how many digits you can say over and over and over again until you can write them down and two hours later you won’t remember that phone number. So your working memory is like a small cup, the kind that you get in the bathroom for using for mouth RINs, they’re really tiny, but we want to move that information to long-term memory. And so working memory helps best in word problems. If we do a part of the problem as we’re reading it, we draw it, we do some calculations, and then we look at the next sentence, how does that change my drawing?

(47:20):

How do I need some new calculations to do? And I have so many people say, read the whole problem three times. Well, my students with dyslexia are going to mark, see and move on. I’m not reading that. So we have to find ways to empower students and make them feel that we’ve taught them the math, they can do it now. They need to read, slowly reflect on it as they’re solving the problem and show them that they can be masters of problem solving. So get those what works, clearinghouse practice guides, and look at your evidence-based strategies.

Stephanie Landis (47:54):

This is so helpful and I think we’ll give everyone some strategies to go and implement at home. But also just another way of thinking about math. And I hear it all the time, and it’s not even the parents that even myself, I’ve sat there with my first graders homework and I was like, I didn’t learn how to do math like this. And then I had to Google how to teach him the way that he was subtracting, and it was like 17 minus nine. And I was like, oh, I just know it. But he was doing something that forced to really

Marilyn Zecher (48:24):

It. He was probably doing the go to the 10 strategy where, okay, you have 17 and we have to take away nine. Well, I can decompose seven, I can decompose. Nine is seven and two, if I take away seven, that gets me to 10 and 10 minus two is eight. And it was

Stephanie Landis (48:41):

Strategy probably pretty similar because I had no idea. But once I did it, I was like, oh, that makes sense and is something that I do in my head. I’m so

Marilyn Zecher (48:49):

Glad you brought that

Stephanie Landis (48:50):

Up. Great. Try and make a 10 and then do things.

Marilyn Zecher (48:52):

Parents and teachers, our kindergarten teachers don’t know vertically what happens in math. So they think I teach this concept or I teach these number facts. Well, when we get to a certain level, lots of teachers say just count on to add and count back to subtract. And they don’t work on the add ends or all the ways to make seven, eight, and nine. And that impacts subtraction substantially. So when rolling dice can you find two dice that make nine, can you find two dice that add up to eight? Those patterns really help all the way up through algebra. The child who does not know that five plus four is nine will not know that four minus nine is negative five. That’s intervention.

Meredith Krimmel (49:39):

And I can say from personal experience that right now, Houston Independent School District is 100% teaching that because the math that comes home, it’s like number bonds and decomposing. Oh

Marilyn Zecher (49:49):

Yeah, that’s it. It’s

Meredith Krimmel (49:50):

All things that I’ve never, but you’re right. There were things I learned in my head.

Marilyn Zecher (49:55):

Yeah, they’re teaching the children to reason mathematically. And then we also have to say, what’s 5,000 plus 9,000? What’s 1,700 minus 900? Because that’s where magnitude goes in the upper grades. So everything that’s taught in first and second grade, kindergarten, first and second grade is the foundation of everything else.

Stephanie Landis (50:20):

And really getting that number sense, that understanding of numbers instead of just memorization.

Marilyn Zecher (50:25):

That’s also the number line. Parents can take a tape measure that you use for sewing and they can fold it at nine and say, now what are some different ways to make nine? And just fold it and say, oh, it’s from seven, it’s two jumps to nine from five. It’s four jumps to nine.

Meredith Krimmel (50:42):

Yeah, it’s a good idea.

Marilyn Zecher (50:43):

And tools you have around the house can be used so easily to teach math. Tape measures, number lines, rulers, tablecloths. One parent built the clock with that tablecloth on the floor and her child built the hands on the clock with his lightsabers from Star Wars.

Stephanie Landis (51:00):

I love that. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. For a while at home we were using magnet tiles instead of unifix cubes or base blocks. We had a ton of them around our house. And those things, when you put ’em together, do get heavy.

Marilyn Zecher (51:13):

Yeah.

Stephanie Landis (51:15):

Well, thank you so much. I really could pick your brain all day, but I want to be respectful of your time. I appreciate this and I have learned so much, and I’m excited to have everybody else hear you and learn from you. And to take all this back to go tell everyone here on campus too.

Marilyn Zecher (51:33):

Well, I was really happy to be here, and I’m always happy to talk to parents. I can say right off the bat though, I don’t do tutor lists, so parents email me every week, do you have a tutor who’s trained by you in this zip code? And it’s like, no, I can’t be that specific. But I do welcome parents and teachers and psychologists and everybody in to get the evidence-based strategies and the research informed methods. And I just read yesterday where one of the major researchers says, teachers are so creative, they find ways to do this, and we need to listen to them more, but we got to get away from just worksheet and number things. We have to do authentic real life math for children.

Stephanie Landis (52:18):

We do have one question that we ask everybody at the end of the podcast, and it can be related to this topic or anything that you want it to be related to, but if you had a piece of advice to give to the listeners, what would you give?

Marilyn Zecher (52:33):

Never underestimate the power of learning. I missed recess for six weeks. I couldn’t learn my timestables. So we enrich our lives. The more experiences we have, the more people we meet, the more places we go. And it helps you grow and it helps you find joy. And so never underestimate the power of learning and giving to others.

Stephanie Landis (52:58):

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. It’s

Marilyn Zecher (53:02):

Been a pleasure talking to you.

Meredith Krimmel (53:05):

Thank you for listening to the Unbabbled podcast. For more information on today’s episode, please see our episode description. For more information on the parish school, visit parish school.org. If you’re not already, don’t forget to subscribe to the UnBabbled Podcast on your app of choice. And if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to leave a rating and review. A special thank you to Andy Williams, Joanna Rissmiller, and Molly Weisselberg for all their hard work behind the scenes. Thanks again for listening.