More Parker School Updates

Parker's teacher and I have been communicating a bunch in person and in email as she tries to figure out exactly how to work with him. She is sending home different homework for him and this latest was a card game of sorts where he had to take 5 cards and use three of them to come closest to 20. (It's important to start teaching smart gambling techniques young.) The rest of the class was learning their phone number and how to read maps.

He had a little trouble setting up the game, but no trouble at all with the game itself. It was just single digit addition and subtraction. When I relayed this to the teacher (as she has asked me to do), she said that the math specialist had noticed he was challenged when asked to fine the "difference" between the scores and that was why the game was picked. But since he had no trouble figuring out that he beat me by 20 points, I was confused.

Then it dawned on me. He didn't know the word "difference" as it related to subtraction. When I asked him to find the difference between the scores, he tried to tell me why the number 24 was different than the number 4. He knows the math concepts, but not the vocabulary that goes with it. I told the teacher about this and she said that made a lot of sense and she would keep this in mind going forward.