Is he just not ready for math?

I have two seven year olds, four months apart in age. The younger one, Elio, turned 7 last week. We’ve done very little math so far and part of the reason is because of some of the replies I get from Elio which makes me think he simply isn’t at a level of maturity to ‘get math’. I wanted to try to give some examples and see if I can get some feedback.

We were counting the days until company comes. It was Wednesday so we had two days until Friday, plus a week to the next Friday, when the company would arrive. My older 7yo offered that a week is 7 days and I ‘yes, said so it will be 2 days plus 7 days’. The both blurted out answers at the same time. The older one was correct but the younger one said 7. This comes up often when I ask for a simple addition response. He doesn’t see that when you add a number to a number, the reply is going to have to be larger than either of the numbers. He often will say one of the addends or even a number lower.

He still doesn’t know he has five fingers on one had, or ten all together. He still counts them every time. We’ve been doing a little of RightStart Level A which strongly discourages counting out. We have practiced a lot with me holding up a certain number of fingers, or working with cards showing dots or tally marks, or working on the abacus, and the children have to recognize the number quickly without counting by recognizing FIVE plus however many, or what a number lower than five looks like. My older 7yo does this just fine but Elio still struggles with it.

Might it just be he isn’t ready for this subject? I’m fine to postpone him learning it for months or another year if that seems to be the issue. Is it that RightStart isn’t a good fit for him? I really like they do mental math and recognize counts without counting each item, but maybe that doesn’t work well for him and he’ll come around to seeing 7 as 5 and 2 on his own later on.

He is very science/engineer minded, always trying to figure out how things work, taking apart anything he can get his hands on…so I assumed math would come easy for him. He finds it very frustrating that his brother can get the right answer so easily when he can’t.

Another interesting thing from his past. He didn’t learn his colors until very late – he was 4 1/2 years old. I had never had a child (he is my 4th) who didn’t just pick up colors, and with him I even did some ‘teaching’ but it didn’t work until suddenly one day, it did. Even he knew something had changed and he was delighted to finally (finally!) get it! Maybe that is just the way he is?

I’d love any thoughts on this.

thanks,

Shannon