Numicon sampler

I've had many questions about Numicon, so I thought I'd make a little video from our first day back at school. Everything in the video is review for Hannah, but she really had not touched any of it for nearly 5 months.

When we bought Numicon, we had to order it from England, but Hooray for Downsedusa! They are now a re-seller of Numicon, so it's available for sale here in the states. It's still pricey. The Firm Foundations kit that we use is $173 plus shipping (but it's currently out of stock). We also have the Conversion to Kit 1, which is what we'll primarily be using this year.

For those of you coming into the thread late, I suggest you look at my previous Numicon posts (found on the "Label" menu to the right---> ).

This is a pretty long video, and only you die hard readers and potential math teachers will want to watch it in entirety. Sorry for the poor video quality--I grabbed Hannah's digital camera since that's what was nearby. I will probably do some more of this kind of thing, since it's really difficult to understand how Numicon works by just reading about it.

Hannah gets a little silly for the camera. And, towards the end of the video you can hear a little bit of her newest speech issue--a slight stutter on the letter N. "N-n-n-n-numicon emergency!!!"

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

First day of school!

Good Morning Student!

Here are some of your subjects for this year.

Let's review Numicon shapes while I prepare the rest of the lesson.

Now, make all variations of 10.

Our day went well, and we did manage some enthusiasm! We reviewed lots of old stuff, and started on the new as well. Hannah chose to begin with her new Health books (of course). Then she chose reading, geography, Numicon (video coming soon), spelling, penmanship, Thinking Skills (love these books), fine motor (made/colored/cut a puzzle), and piano (always last). She cooked her lunch (Annie's Macaroni and Cheese), and now she's painting. We have dance this afternoon, and then we're done!

If only I can make it a routine, then we'll be set!

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A funny:

Hannah chose four colors for her puzzle. One was a yellow, labeled "canary". We briefly talked about what a canary is.

When she was done coloring, I was glanced over and saw that the yellow was so very light.

Mom: Oh, that yellow is very light.

Hannah: Yes....(thinking)...as light as a feather!

Back to School

Another post for homeschoolers. This may be pretty boring to the rest of you! (or, to all of you!)

I'm just going to go through how Hannah is doing with some of her academic subjects and other activities. It might sound like a lot of stuff, but really, we rarely "do school" for more than 3 hours a day, and usually that's only three or four days a week at most.

We always take a decadent amount of time off from homeschooling over the holidays. Something like six weeks! We had a few days last week where we sat down and fiddled around with book work, to get our feet wet. But today we hunkered down and knocked our heads together and got some good work done.

Hannah is working on alphabetizing words and looking them up in the dictionary. For Christmas she/we got the game Bananagrams. Since she's not much of a speller, we used the tiles today (similar to Scrabble tiles) to make her spelling words rather than writing them out, and then put them in alphabetical order. Later we organized all the tiles by letter and made a graph of how many of each letter there were. To count them, we put them in Numicon shape order. It was nice to see that the school break did not slow down her numeracy knowledge!

In math we are working on learning "doubling". She also is getting quite comfortable with tens so I know hundreds won't be far behind. She still favors "story" problems.

I'm glad that Hannah is getting more independent with her language arts work. We are using the Pathway Readers and workbooks. She has a workbook page to do before she reads the chapter, and one or two pages to do after the chapter. The workbook pages focus on comprehension, some phonics, and other grammar topics. I'm not big into grammar. In fact, I never taught my older kids any grammar. Everything they know about grammar has come from studying a foreign language! I really like the Pathway readers because, even though we are obviously not Amish (really?), the stories are sweet and not cluttered with social overtones.

Hannah is almost finished with her book on maps. She has really enjoyed learning how to find things on a grid and following directions on a street map. I will have to find another book for her. This one is for Grade 3, and I don't thinks she's quite ready for the 4th grade book, so I'll have to look for a different publisher. In addition to the geography book, she's been working on memorizing the States and can point out about 30 of them on a blank map.

We're still doing Handwriting Without Tears to work on getting smaller print. We still have not gotten her new bifocal glasses due to various roadblocks, but hopefully later this month we'll have it all sorted out.

For reading she chose a Magic Tree House book. We had been reading a Boxcar Children book before our break, but that was a very slow process, the font is small. For pleasure reading Hannah prefers easier books like Arthur or Magic School Bus. I have no idea what reading level she's on, but I'd guess it's somewhere towards the end of 3rd grade.

We are also studying Health. Hannah is developing into a young lady, and we are learning about the changes in her body. I am hoping we won't need this information for at least another year, but she is growing quickly and there is no way of telling. She is an eager student--of course--it's "medical". I am using the book "Teaching Children with Down Syndrome about Their Bodies, Boundaries, and Sexuality". I posted about this book a few months ago, and I still love it. It is appropriate for preschoolers on up through teens (even adults if they have not had enough appropriate instruction). Don't be put off by the title--there is good information in it. I really like the materials and worksheets in the appendix.

Today was the start of a new session at our local homeschool enrichment center. Hannah is in a dissection class. She is really excited about this! Today they dissected an earthworm (with a lab partner). I was not in the class, but the teacher said Nan asked some very good questions (I know one was, "Where is the brain?" because I could hear it out in the waiting room. When she came out of class she said, "Guess what Mom? A worm has ZERO brain!"). Did you know that a worm has five hearts? I did not remember that from 7th grade science. I think they are not really hearts, but something like an aortic something (I am so precise...it's a wonder my kids ever learn anything!).

Hannah's other new activity for Mondays is a dance/movement class called "Miracles in Motion". This is the first class/activity that she's been in that is for kids with special needs. We went to observe it in December, and she loved it. I was skeptical about it since the ages range from 5-17. There are only about 7 kids in the class, and the dance instructor has an adorable two-year old boy with Ds. Hannah comes out of the class proud and happy.

Piano lessons started last week, so Hannah has some new pieces. Her new sheet music is titled "Circus Jugglers". As challenging as it is for her, she is quite enthusiastic since the circus is coming to town next month! When she was younger she wanted to be a ringmaster when she grew up.

Swimming lessons are scheduled back-to-back with Theater class, so we can knock them out in one trip. We live sort of out in the middle of nowhere--it takes 20-30 minutes to get any place, so I try to consolidate trips. Our busy days are Mondays and Thursdays. For the most part, we are flexible the rest of the time--taking in a homeschool park day or go bowling with friends in the afternoon.

Now I'm tired just thinking about it all. Maybe it's time for another school break?
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Chris started his semester today as well. He is taking Chemistry, Biology, Human Development (Psych), and Logic at the community college. He's also taking German 4 online and English Literature with me. He will be starting his Scuba course soon. For a Christmas/Graduation present my Dad (almost 76 years old!) is taking him on a Caribbean Scuba trip this Spring! Dad needs to re-certify--it's been more than a few years since he last went diving.

Kate is back in Minnesota, wanting a dog sled to get her to and from class! There's plenty of snow and frigid temperatures there! Her school has a 4-1-4 schedule, so in January she only has one class for a few hours every day for several weeks. She's taking Music in the Digital Age (or something close to that). She loves the January term because she likes to focus on one subject at a time and really delve into it deeply. She wishes it could be this way through the whole school year. She'll be home again in early February for another break before her final semester.

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Coming soon: Hannah's Photography Gallery!
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p.s. the Praying Mantis was laid to rest over the weekend. She was so interesting! We'll see how the eggs do in the spring!

Numicon Visitors!

Yesterday we had fun with some new friends from Northern Virginia. I met the mom, Angela, a few years ago when Wendy and I presented an oral motor workshop in Hampton, VA. At that time she had two little girls, four and two years old. Kathryn, the two year old, has Down syndrome. I had not seen Angela since then, until this summer when I went up to hear Sue Buckley in Fairfax (or somewhere close...I forget exactly where the seminar was!). She was there with her husband, and her newborn daughter, Christy. We caught up with one another that day, and have been periodically emailing back and forth. Since Angela and Paul were considering purchasing Numicon as a supplement to the public school's math curriculum, I suggested they come down to Richmond and look it over first.

We had a great day! The three big girls (Hannah, 10, Rachel, 7 and Kathryn, 5) all played outside for a good while. Meanwhile the grown-ups (plus adorable Christy) played with Numicon. When the girls came in, both Rachel and Kathryn couldn't wait to play with the materials. It was great to see them manipulate and figure out how they could use the tiles and rods. I meant to take some pictures, but we were having too much fun!


I really didn't try to sell them on Numicon (sometimes I think this blog is practically an advertisement!). Since it's so expensive, I didn't want them to spend all that money only to not be satisfied (especially since I'd sort of be to blame since I've been praising it on various Ds lists). I think Numicon sold itself.

It didn't take long for Angela to realize how different Numicon is from other math programs. Numicon focuses on helping a child build a concept image of number. This means that a child has an idea, in their "mind's eye" what, for example, is 5. Most of us, if we close our eyes, can conjure up an image of five. It might be an array such as we see on dice. It might be five fingers, it might be five objects that are groups of 2 and 3. Whatever it is, it's different for every person. You automatically know that four is one less than five, and you know that six is one more. For most people, the highest number of objects that they can easily recognize is four. Imagine if you were pouring out Aspirin tablets. If you glance down and see five tablets, you most likely have actually seen three tablets and two tablets. Your brain is so fast, it instantly can add up and tell yourself that there are five. Or, maybe the tablets are arranged so they look like a "5" on a die. You can recognize that combination too. Or, if you spilled out 7 tablets, your brain organizes them into groups of 4 and 3, or maybe 5 and 2, but you pretty much instantly know that it's "7" that are there. This is the kind of "ownership" of numbers that I want Hannah to have. I think it's really necessary to "know" numbers so well that they are recognizable by patterns (2 sets of 3 is six. Six is also one more than five. It's 4 and 2; it's one less than seven, etc). Sure, lots of arithmetic can be done by counting, and using number lines, but I want Hannah to have her own concept of each number. I want her to be able to imagine chopping off a set of "3" from "7" and know right away that it leaves "4". Yes, she can do arithmetic on paper, with a number line, or Touchmath points or an abacus. But she is just going through the motions; it's just "counting". When she has memorized math facts she hasn't been able to generalize that information to other settings (we had 4 napkins, but added 4 more, how many more napkins do we have now? If I don't use the exact wording that she's used to, she can't come up with the answer.) But she can now. It's coming, slowly, but she is really getting her own image of number.

Numicon is multi-sensory, which works really well for our children with special learning needs. It provides lots of visual input, as well as tactile learning. It's fun, and there are lots of game-like activities. It was interesting to see Kathryn's exploration with the materials. She has very clear speech for a five-year old with Down syndrome, and she was busy matching "turquoise" tiles and putting them in place on the base board. She had all the tiles out, spread over the table (that's about 80 tiles), but she could quickly determine the exact one she needed to fill a particular space. She played for a solid 40 minutes or more, exploring different ways the tiles fit together, and how to use them as puzzle pieces, dumping them out again and again. She was so busy learning and exploring, it was fun to watch her.

Rachel, a typical seven-year old, played happily with the Cuisenaire rods, making beautiful patterns in trays, arranging and sorting by length and color to make quilt-like arrays. Both girls were so engrossed in their work/play that the grownups had time to sift through the specifics of the specific kits/packages that Numicon offers.

I can only speak on my experience with Hannah; I don't know if Numicon is the arithmetic answer for all kids with Ds. But I think that anyone who is seriously looking for a supplement to potentially change their child's arithmetic experience should consider it.

And Hannah thinks that we should have more people come to look at Numicon, especially if they bring babies and playmates along! (Katie, aren't you jealous! We had a baby here!)

Numicon Part II: Getting to know you….

Here are the main characters in the Single User Foundation Kit of Numicon.

The Board. It is a 10x10 grid. It’s sort of like a Duplo Baseplate.


The Shapes, which I call tiles. These are sturdy plastic pieces, pleasing to touch. (I love the sensible packaging the materials come in also. Everything is very user friendly and of high quality.)



The Pegs. I don’t remember how many came with the set—we counted them once, and there were about 80. I wish there were 100, so we could fill the Board. The pegs are great for fine motor work, and they fit on little fingers even better than black olives! They can be used for patterns, representing shapes (in the picture I have them arranged in a 6-shape), and all kinds of building fun (which is later used for multiplication, I think).
This is a 5-shape, filled with 3 green pegs, and 2 yellow pegs, symbolizing 3+2=5


The Cards. These are very nice, laminated and sturdy, and explain how to use the materials. There are 12 cards with 3-5 activities per card, plus additional challenging activities to help the student connect what they are doing with Numicon to relevant activities in real life.


The Book. I read this a long time ago, and need to refresh my memory before I tell you anything more about it. I remember it being easy to read, but then, I have been teaching for 16 years, so I’m sort of used to reading stuff like it. I don’t know how easy it would be to digest for a novice parent/teacher…I imagine it would be fine.

Table of Contents

There are some other fun things, like the Board Overlays, Spinners and the Feely Bag. Since I bought both the Foundation and the Kit One, Plus Pack, and some extra things, I’m not sure which items belong to which set. But, that’s irrelevant since Numicon has repackaged and renamed their kits, so you wouldn’t necessarily have the same exact items that I have. Numicon has also added the “Closing the Gap” kit, which looks interesting for elementary aged children. The advantage to Closing the Gap is that the book/instructions do not have photos of children, so older children will not think they are working on "preschool" stuff.

These overlays include pictures, patterns and combinations of tiles (all possible ways of creating seven). They lay directly on top of the board, and turn it into a sort of puzzle.


If you turned this overlay over (that sounds weird!), the same pattern would be on the back, but it would be in gray, so the student would need to recognize the quantity (1's and 2's) instead of color matching (orange and light blue). I put some tiles on the 3, 4 and 5 spots so you could see how they look on the board.


The Spinners! I love these. In the Kit 1 book there are templates to photocopy and cut out, so the spinners can change from numerals to numicon shapes, to addition or subtraction and so on. In this example, Hannah was working on subtraction. She spun a 10-shape (the right-hand spinner) and a 3 (left-hand spinner). She had to then, in her head, figure out what was left over, if she "chopped 3 off of a 10-shape". She picked up a pink 7 tile. She used to do this by physically holding the 10-shape and covering three of the holes to visualize what was left. With enough practice, she can now do it with fewer manipulatives.

I like this number line too.

I already had Cuisenaire Rods, which we use with Numicon as well. I think they call them "Number Rods". You can easily get these in the USA, so don't buy them from Numicon (in fact, they told me that over the phone, to save me $$ on cost and shipping). We didn't have the trays for the rods, so I did buy them from Numicon.

Hannah is filling the trays. The tray that holds the 8 rods (8 cm long) can hold eight 8-rods, the 7-tray can hold seven of the 7 cm rods, etc.

The trays can be stacked to make pyramids.

I will post more on HOW we use the materials, hopefully over the weekend. It's supposed to be a cooler weekend, and we don't have much to do other than finish college applications for Chris. I'll be ready to take a break from finishing his transcript to come play on blogger!

Numicon, Part 1

Here it is. The math you've been waiting for. Listen up, parents of children with Down syndrome: This is the math your child needs. If your child is struggling with math (and not all children with Down syndrome do struggle, but most do), consider this program.

I'm a pretty analytical person. I appreciate efficiency (even if I'm not always efficient). I have been homeschooling for 15+ years, and I've looked at hundreds of approaches to academic subjects. And, for the past decade, I've been researching Trisomy 21.

Here is my verdict: Numicon is an excellent curriculum.



It brings math within reach of our concrete learners! It starts with something I love: exploratory learning. It is open-ended enough that the student can create their own solutions to problems (what other ways can you make 9?), but yet structured enough that you won't be worried that they're just playing. For years Hannah has been able to add and subtract with numbers 1-10 (and a bit higher I suppose). She always needed some sort of manipulative (abacus, number line, fingers, unifix cubes, dice, etc. We used them all).

The plain old number sentences just were a "formula" that had to be solved for no apparent reason. It meant nothing to her. She knew the rules and she applied them, but it was all busy work, with no transference to her everyday world. We tried memorizing math facts, but that too didn't get us very far (and as you've seen, we LOVE flashcards for everything else). We looked at TouchMath and at Math-U-See, and Mathematics Made Meaningful. We tried different workbooks (Singapore Math, Miquon Math, Modern Curriculum Press, etc.), we tried homemade solutions, we tried the How To Teach Math to People with Down Syndrome and Other Concrete Learners (and even went to the author's seminar: NOT WORTH IT). The book does have some good ideas, but not enough for a full curriculum. What I was searching for was a way for Hannah to understand numbers. I want them to have meaning to her, just as words have meaning.

Hannah could do word problems. In fact, she loved word problems more than just number sentences, I guess because they told a story.

Uncle Dudley found 3 flowers in the front yard and 6 more in the neighbor's yard. He picked them all. How many did he pick? Did he get in trouble for picking his neighbor's flowers?

At least there is something interesting about the numbers in the sentence, and she could build it herself. But she still needed the number line.

Yet, when she'd set the table, and only pull out three forks, she would not be able to figure out how many more she'd need for our family of five. But now she can! It's coming....slowly but surely, she is figuring out numbers. She is starting to know, innately, that 6 is made up of 1 and 5, or 2 and 4, or 3 and 3. She can actually see that 11 is not the same as 1 and 1 (which, even though she knows is 2, she'd always make the same error). She knows it's 10 and one more. Or 5 and 5 and 1. One of the slogans on the Numicon site is, "Making numbers real". It's true. Math is now Hannah's favorite subject.

It's likely that you've never heard of Numicon before. That's because it isn't sold in the United States. Yet. It is a British curriculum. It was not created specifically for the Ds population, but it seems like it is! Sue Buckley's group, DownsEd, has utilized Numicon for years and has published several articles and books about utilizing Numicon with children with Down syndrome. The Down Syndrome Foundation of Orange County's Learning Program uses Numicon, among other educational approaches based on Sue Buckley's research. (an aside: earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend a day-long seminar with Sue Buckley. She covered a lot of ground, but didn't have enough time to do much with math. She's a very interesting person.) Coming from England, the cost for the Foundation Kit, plus the additional materials for Kit 1 would run close to $400, plus shipping costs (which are considerable). It's the single most expensive homeschooling curriculum I've ever purchased. And I wish I did it years ago. Imagine where she'd be if we started this five years ago!

Fortunately, Numicon now has a new package that is called "Closing the Gap". It looks like it would be a terrific supplement for a child who attends school, and it's more affordable. Also, Numicon is working to get a US distributor, so hopefully you'll be able to buy it here and save on shipping. If you homeschool, I'd recommend going with one of the complete sets (single user). Numicon is also a perfect math curriculum for typical children from the ages of 3-7 (or, possibly older, but I haven't gotten that far to know).

I know that Hannah is able to follow the "rules" of arithmetic, and will eventually use a calculator to solve most math problems (so do I!). But I really want her to understand numbers. I want her to own them, to know them inside and out. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting more about Numicon so you can get a feel for it, and see if maybe it's what your child needs too.