At Preschool and Kindergarten stages
- Difficulty counting items one by one – when asked to count a certain number of items put in front of him, he says “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, …” but does not point to each item in turn. So if there were 4 items, he would carry on verbally till a number of his choice.
- Mixes up numbers when counting in sequence to 20 – difficulty articulating past 10 or gets the teen numbers of 11, 12, 13 mixed up.
- Mixes up numbers when counting in sequence not starting from 1 – start counting from “6, 7, …” pause can your kindergartener pick it up?
- When counting items, needs to count from 1, even when you add only one item every time.
- Has difficulty connecting the numeral 7 to the same number of objects.
- Has difficulty organising objects in order of size, colour and shape.
At Primary School
- Trouble recalling maths facts for addition, multiplication, etc – keep counting on fingers or drawing sticks to do a computation.
- Keeps counting on fingers.
- Doesn’t know which operation to apply – after reading a story sum, he does not know to add, subtract or multiply, or in cases of multiple operations, he does not know which to do first.
- Calculating wrongly in columns – mixes up carrying forward and/or regrouping when subtracting.
In Secondary school
- Maths remain an academic subject instead of being applied to real-life like estimating at the supermarket, checking exact change back.
- Dislikes using measuring spoons and cups when cooking or doing a project.
- Has directional problems – fears getting lost.
- Hates reading charts and graphs and making sense of S and Y axis.
- Does not enjoy finding more than one solution to the same problem.
- Does not enjoy activities or games that require estimation of totals in numbers.
- Great difficulty grasping abstract concepts like algebra.