A child who blanks on 7 plus 8 for the hundredth time is often reasoning about math at grade level, sometimes above it. It sounds like a contradiction, and it isn’t. Pulling a memorized fact from memory is closer to word retrieval than to arithmetic, the exact skill that runs slow in many children who struggle with reading. Your child isn’t broken. Their brain is learning differently, and the drills most schools reach for send math facts through the narrowest channel it has.
FROM THE VIDEO
Key moments from Addition & Subtraction Math Facts for Dyscalculia and Dyslexia with Adrianne Meldrum and Heather Brand of Made for Math:
Common questions from parents
Why does my child know a math fact one day and forget it the next?
Are flashcards bad for a child with dyscalculia or dyslexia?
Is struggling with math facts a sign of dyscalculia?
How long should math fact practice take each day?
A child who blanks on 7+8 is often at grade level in math reasoning. Fact recall is word retrieval, the exact channel that runs slow in dyslexia. The fix starts with three facts at a time.
Math Facts and Math Are Two Different Jobs
Adrianne Meldrum is a certified multisensory math instructor and the founder of Made for Math, an online tutoring center. In the webinar above, she shares a figure that stops parents cold. Middle school teachers report that more than half of their students do not know their math facts. Learning differences alone explain nowhere near that many children. Something about how facts get taught is failing kids who could learn them.
Meldrum points to brain imaging for the reason. Solving a math problem draws on several systems at once: the sense of quantity, visual information, and the words we attach to numbers. Reciting a memorized fact leans almost entirely on the verbal route. She cites reading researcher Sally Shaywitz, who described math fact recall as word retrieval, an area of weakness for many children who struggle with reading. Holding the problem in mind is one more job running at the same time. And children developing math skills often carry differences in how numbers get meaning and how quantities sit in space.
Here is the part worth pinning to the refrigerator: weak facts do not mean weak math. Meldrum’s own son struggled badly with math facts while being gifted at mathematics itself. A slow fact is a retrieval problem, not a thinking problem.
A slow fact is a retrieval problem, not a thinking problem.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Flashcards Are a Filing Tool, Not a Teaching Tool
Most of the standard tools ask a child to recall bare symbols with almost no meaning attached. Flashcards, mad minutes, timed math fact tests. Meldrum’s team does not demonize them. They have a place, and it comes late: moving facts a child already knows from short-term memory into long-term storage. The trouble starts when they are used to introduce a fact for the first time.
Working memory holds about four chunks of information, and only for a few seconds. A page of twenty mixed problems overloads that space before learning begins. Whatever is not reviewed and connected soon fades. That is why a child who knew the sevens in September loses them by October. Many curriculums make it worse by teaching a fact family for two weeks and never circling back.
One clarification matters, because multisensory gets confused with a debunked idea. Researchers tested matching instruction to a child’s supposed learning style in 2008 and found no evidence it helps. The result was independently reconfirmed in 2024. Multisensory math is the opposite move. Every child works sight, sound, touch, and movement together on the same fact, so the quantity, the spoken fact, and the written symbols connect. Nobody is sorting your child into a hands-on learner box.
Key takeaways
- Facts and reasoning are separate jobs: A child slow on math facts is often strong at math itself.
- Flashcards come last: Use them to lock in known facts, never to introduce new ones.
- Small sets stick: Three or four connected facts at a time match what working memory holds.
Four Moves That Make a Fact Stick
The method Meldrum and her colleague Heather Brand demonstrate follows the shape of an Orton-Gillingham reading lesson, applied to numbers. Start from what the child knows. Teach directly. Tie the concrete, the picture, and the symbols together at the same time. Four moves carry most of the weight.
- Narrow the set. Teach three or four facts at a time, not every way to make ten at once. Small sets fit the space a child has to work with.
- Build the quantity. Have your child construct dot patterns with cubes or counters, so amounts become something they recognize at a glance. This is number sense built by hand, not by staring at symbols.
- Touch it and say it. Your child moves the cubes while saying the fact aloud and writing it, so the amount, the words, and the symbols land together. A child who blanks on words gains a second way in: “I remember building my 4 plus 4.”
- Teach families, not items. From 3 plus 3, a child reasons out 3 plus 4, flips it to 4 plus 3, then finds 7 minus 3 and 7 minus 4. One anchor fact unlocks four. That shrinks the memorization load exactly where memory is the struggle.
Then protect the schedule. Short sessions most days beat a long weekly one, because long gaps hand the gains back. And judge speed fairly. Ask your child something they solidly know, like their own age, and notice how long the answer takes. That is their pace for a known fact. Hold the math facts to that standard, not to a class-wide timer.
Flashcards are a filing tool, not a teaching tool. They lock in what a child knows; they don’t teach what a child hasn’t met.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You want your child to walk into math class without their stomach dropping. What stands in the way is rarely effort, theirs or yours. It is a system that hands out timers and mixed drill sheets and watches half the class stumble. Then it files the strugglers under labels instead of fixing the method. You are the one person positioned to change how this goes, and the work fits at a kitchen table. You don’t need a credential to be the most important teacher your child will ever have. You already are that teacher. The only question is whether you have the right tools.
Math facts are the practice layer. Underneath them sit the skills the practice runs on: working memory, visual processing, body awareness. Our Brain Bloom program builds that underlying layer. It does not replace the daily math practice; it makes the practice pay off.
And a math fact struggle rarely travels alone. Many children working on their facts also show signs of reading strain, listening difficulties, or wobbly focus. All Access covers every Learning Success program in one membership, so you follow what your child shows you next instead of chasing a single label.
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Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
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A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
