What is Dyscalculia?
The Department for Education defines dyscalculia as:
‘a condition that affects the ability to acquire arithmetical skills. Dyscalculic learners may have difficulty understanding simple number concepts, lack an intuitive grasp of numbers, and have problems learning number facts and procedures. Even if they produce a correct answer or use a correct method, they may do so mechanically and without confidence.’
You might not be dyscalculic. Dyslexia can also affect the way you learn maths. Some people with dyslexic traits, by no means all, find learning by heart difficult (hence times tables and formulae), whereas they might find their way to an answer by their own route. Others make errors when calculating because they have limited ‘working memories’, and forget where they were, e.g. what figure they just had in their heads.
It may be a help to use different colours for different items (units, tens, hundreds), or to have table squares for visualising tables.