Mental math is an ability to perform calculations in your head without using paper and pencil or a calculator or other tools. Is it an ability that some people have or is it something that can be learned?
Multisensory learning, or the use of more than one of the senses like seeing, hearing, or touching – is a hallmark of structured literacy or Orton-Gillingham type instruction for dyslexic students.
What is helpful about Marilyn Zecher’s teaching on multisensory math is that she recognizes the importance of conceptual understanding among dyslexic students.
There are some wonderful free resources from the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI), but a nice one is the game generator to change up practice a bit.
Although speech difficulties were observed in Samuel Orton’s earliest reports about dyslexic people, schools and even researchers have focused more on reading than speech.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 2, the Texas Education Freedom Act, establishing the country’s largest ESA or Education Savings Account which will launch in the 2026-2027 school year.
For many dyslexic students, math reasoning is quite strong and may be above average, but in routine classroom tasks, one may never see it because instructions are misread, working memory becomes overloaded.
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