Special Needs

Article from Downs Ed (UK) on the challenges of teaching numeracy to children with Down syndrome.

Students with special needs will benefit from a kit known as Closing the Gap. This kit has been designed specifically for pupils of any age who are experiencing significantly greater difficulty learning mathematics than the majority of pupils of their age – that is, pupils who are working well below the level expected of their chronological ages. 

It is suitable for use as a remedial or Learning Intervention Programme and also for pupils who have special needs. It is well documented that pupils with Special Educational Needs learn most effectively through multi-sensory teaching; Numicon’s emphasis on doing and seeing, alongside speaking and listening, capitalises on pupils’ visual and kinaesthetic strengths throughout the teaching activities.

The aim of this Kit is to enable pupils to develop the sound foundation of basic number understanding essential if they are to achieve their individual potential and for all pupils to have a positive experience of learning mathematics.

The Closing the Gap teaching materials offer practical solutions to pupils’ difficulties to support teachers in their assessment, planning and teaching. The programme of small-step teaching follows the typical acquisition of early number skills, addressing the acquisition of numerosity (awareness of the number of objects in a set), counting, the ability to recognise and exploit pattern, and early computation.

All activities include further ideas for differentiation; mathematical language; connecting activities and application; and are linked to the Assessment tools.

Some students will move quickly through the Closing the Gap activities and move on to the work in Numicon Kit 1. Others will move more slowly and take longer because they have greater barriers to learning. However independent research projects report consistently that the majority of children show a marked rise in confidence with maths when they work with Numicon.

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