Ouch!

I'm almost done administering the ITBS to my third-grader. Once she got used to the pacing, she did fairly well. I was apprehensive about the math segments, though, because she has been very resistant about doing arithmetic. Math concepts, she gets and likes. Arithmetic invites sighs, attitude, and massive resistance. However, because she can tell she understands the math and performs well in other subjects, we've had years of her acting as though Mom's admonitions to learn her math facts fast are not all that important.

Thank you, ITBS, for forcing her to see how behind she is on developing her calculation skills. I just reviewed her math concepts test, and she only missed one out of 22 questions. But she only did half the problems in all the other math sections (which caused her to need a crying break in her room after the first time it happened), and on the last one, math computation, she filled in the bubbles for less than half of the problems and got a third of those wrong (some quite simple, which brought me to tears).

It seems to me that she has literally wired her brain to temporarily shut down and then move like cold molasses on basic addition and subtraction questions because they are not interesting or fun to her. She's only eight, and I am trying not to despair. I feel like I have already tried every math fact resource, but to be honest, I've avoided math fact family triangles. They seemed hokey to me. But I'll do it for her. This hurdle must be cleared somehow.