Just yesterday I was reading a book describing a far away country. The author related how from the window of a moving train he saw children playing hop scotch.
As a child, I spent many happy moments playing hop scotch on the dirt floor outside my grandma's squatter house. It was also one of the favourite games in primary school in the nineteen sixties.
Season after season flew by and by the time my children were born, computer games and game boys were what children in the late nineteen nineties chose. Being a nostalgic person, I would acquire some color chalk, draw on the cement floor and teach my children, nephews, nieces and their friends the 'aeroplane' hop scotch. Looking at how some of them struggled, I then realized how much physical games train a child in terms of balance and co-ordination.
When my daughter was in Grade One, her classmate used to come to our house at least two nights a week to do their homework together. All went well until it came to addition in Maths where the numbers they added bring them to carry tens or twenties from the digit column to the tens columns. There Aurora would either get the total wrong or she would forget to carry. Should she have gotten the digit column correct, the tens column would be out or vice versa.
I was obviously tearing my hair out, not angry at the girl; more of being frustrated at my inability to teach her. My son stepped in and suggested that we use a container; should there be one 'ten' to carry, we put in one chip. Then we introduced an extra step: (1) One chip for one 'ten', (2) Before writing down the 'ten' column total, we look at the plastic container. So far so good; as long as we did it step by step, guiding her along, she would get it right.
Then we jubilantly let her do the rest with less and less guidance. The results were mixed; should she remember to check the container, then she would successfully carry that ten. After Aurora went home, we shared our frustration with my husband. He asked a lot of questions. At the end he said that for whatever reason, Aurora had no storage space or 'buffer' apart from her main working area in her head. Oh dear, how would one go about creating a new register within a human brain?
It is now more than ten years later; I honestly cannot recall if we just stumbled on the solution?! Or did I pray and dream about the solution? One thing I do recall is seeing a book in the town council library about a snail hop scotch. I drew it and tested the game with my son. Then we played it once with both my son and daughter.
You may not believe it, but we had to simplify it for Aurora. The first day we just taught her the mechanics of alternating two feet with one foot around the circle (In terms of maths, it is like adding single digits not amounting to ten.). The next session we taught her going around to reach the center, turning around and retracing her steps to the beginning (like remembering to start adding from the right, moving onto the left). Then we had to teach her to pick up a stone before starting (like noting that we need to carry a 'ten'), then having to remember to drop the stone in the center before the about turn to get out of the circle (to remember to add the 'ten' or 1 to the 'tens' column).
It really took her an entire week of daily learning and practicing before she could do all of it together. Of course we had fun playing. My son was tall and had wide feet; his weakest point was stepping and erasing chalk line. I would try hopping in all the narrow confined boxes and get all out of breath. My daughter found it the easiest; she was tiny, quick and nimble.
The funny thing was, around the time Aurora could finally win the snail hop scotch, she also ceased having problems totting up multiple numbers into a final total. Somehow, the concrete physical actions to remember created the extra register space to keep track of 'carrying' for arithmetic.
* frogspawn-coral-lg from fishlore.com
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