Mabel, Abner, and Zoya’s Success: Overcoming Learning Disabilities and Tears at Mathtime at Home

Summary

Mabel, Abner, and Zoya have learning disabilities that make math a slow and painful process for their mom during homeschooling. On top of running a busy household with seven children, finding the time or patience to teach her three kids more was daunting - until the family found Elephant Learning.

1.) Challenges

For Mabel, (11 years old) mathematics was a hard and tedious process. She was using Math-U-See Gamma slowly and was way behind on concepts. For instance, double-digit multiplication seemed like torture, basic addition was confusing, and equivalents (like three feet equaling one yard) were not locked in. Teaching Mabel was tricky because even though it occasionally seemed like she was grasping the information, her reviews and tests showed otherwise. Her mom was trying to help with right brain strategies but also needed to give attention to her other kids, Abner and Zoya, who needed an equal amount of attention. Abner (13 years old) is dyslexic, which made reading math story problems extremely hard. Unless someone was reading problems to him, Abner would take three or more hours to get through a small Math-U-See lesson. Despite his dyslexia, Abner still enjoyed math.  But his mom needed a program to help him work with numbers faster so she could reduce the time she was helping him read problems. Zoya (8 years old), like her brother Abner, is also dyslexic. However, her dyslexia is with numbers rather than words. While doing mathematics, she would often write and say numbers backward. For example, if she read 31 in a problem, she would write down 13. Though Zoya was making slow improvements, the process was still slow and painful for her mom.

2.) Finding Elephant Learning

After pouring all her creativity into helping her kids learn, eventually Mabel, Abner, and Zoya’s mom felt burnt out, feeling as though she lacked what her children needed to excel in mathematics. When she heard that Elephant Learning can help kids learn one year of math in three months, she was immediately intrigued.

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3.) Mabel, Abner, and Zoya’s Experience With Elephant Learning

To their mom’s surprise, all the kids loved playing on Elephant Learning. The games were intriguing and attention-grabbing. Mabel, who struggled retaining new concepts was having more “aha” moments. Concepts were clicking faster and easier. All along, Abner and Zoya were finding it easier to read and understand math without their dyslexia reducing their performance. The game structure meant less reading math problems, and more hearing them for Abner. On the other hand, number visualization helped reduce number errors for Zoya.

‍Related: The Three-Step Method to Teaching Math

4.) Mabel, Abner, and Zoya’s Results

Mabel

• Age: 12.4 years
• Starting Elephant Learning Age: 7.9 years
• Current Elephant Learning Age: 9.3 years
• The difference after 2 months: 1.4 years

Abner

• Age: 14.3 years
• Starting Elephant Learning Age: 7.8 years
• Current Elephant Learning Age: 10.3 years
• The difference after 2 months: 2.5 years

Zoya

• Age: 8.2 years
• Starting Elephant Learning Age: 5.75 years
• Current Elephant Learning Age: 7.4 years
• The difference after 2 months: 1.65 years

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