My 10YO daughter gets overwhelmed with new math topics very easily. She will burst into tears and say, “It’s too hard” or “I’ll never learn this” or “I’m going to get them all wrong” or even just refuse to try to do the work.
We’ve been using Teaching Textbooks for the past two years, which has always worked well with my other three kids. Should I be looking for a different curriculum or working with her on perseverance and attitude? I am honestly at a loss. She is generally a positive, obedient kid, but her reaction to math ruins our schooling day and makes her grumpy a good part of the afternoon.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>Hmmm, is she a perfectionist in other areas, or is this issue just math? If this is her general personality, I wouldn’t necessarily switch the curriculum. If it’s only an issue with math, is it just recently? You could also try just talking with her about it first. See what she thinks is the root issue.</p>
I have not used TT before, but could you pretend the text and give her a heads up with what is coming and maybe even sit with her while she works?
For example, my oldest would get frustrated when she got to long division, it is time consuming. I let her know it just takes time and at any time she could ask me to check her work so that she did not get discouraged when doing a problem and would get to the end and have it wrong because a simple error earlier on in the problem. When my next child came to that point, I was able to let him know before he even started learning it, that it takes time and ask for help as needed. Yes, time consuming but all part of the process. Since I was able to just sit and work through the problems with them, catching errors as they worked instead of waiting until the end of a worksheet and thrnhaving errors, it helped keep their confidence higher through more challenging new things. I still do that with my oldest who gets discouraged faster. She is in Algebra 1 and usually when she learns something knew she sits at my desk and works with me for a couple days, I check her work as she works through the problems, to make sure she is following steps and keeping on track and positive along the way.