M and I have not been doing any formal school in a while, but he has been announcing math facts so I know that he is thinking about things. Like, "If you add an odd number and an odd number, and another odd number, it will be an odd number, wait, no, yeah, that’s right…"
Today he bounced on my futon in the living room, where I am usually to be found, elevating my foot, and told me that, "If you had three groups of four, and took two away, then you would have ten."
I got out a paper, wrote his sentence, then showed him how to use the x for "groups of" and + for "and," and = for is. He tried dictating a few more sentences, then ran off down the hallway.
Sometimes when I worked at the Community College of Lake County, in Illinois, our math phobic students would relax when we showed them how the grammar of a sentence in an word problem related to a math sentence. Especially if you looked at the last sentence where the question was, and let the subject of the sentence be your X. I wish I knew where that technique came from, there was a hand out or something, it was the first time I’d ever seen that sort of grammar/symbol correspondence, and it always made our English major students relax.
I am more verbal than mathematical, so using the IS instead of = always helped me a lot! :-)
Great tip.