Advanced Math Skills for Young Learners | The Kenzy Method

The prerequisites for this class are:
1.  a willingness to try something new
2. a willingness to work hard

Few students, less than a third, ever do this and go through school struggling with math, feeling frustrated, lost and discouraged.  However, learning these skills years before they are expected to will give them a definite advantage.  

The numbers 0-9 have very cool patterns, but not everyone can see them.  Once you see them, they are difficult to unsee.  With practice, these patterns make adding and subtracting easy to do without counting fingers.  Since learning these doesn't happen by accident, students will be walked through each step and given enough practice to make these skills automatic.  This, by definition, means they would have mastered the basic facts.  

The Kenzy Method

The numbers 0-4 have similar patterns to the 5-9.  Specifically each smaller number follows similar patterns to the number exactly 5 larger than it.  Here are the number pairs:

0,5
1,6
2,7
3,8
4,9

To remember each pair, the students will learn connections.  For example, to remember that 3 and 8 are partners, see that each has 3 lines down the middle and a 3 looks like the back side or shadow of an 8.  Similar connections are made for the other pairs.

Once students see these connections, they will learn to use this to calculate simple questions.

For addition, they will see that 1 + 2 is similar to 6 + 7 in that they both end with 3, for example.  

For subtraction they will see that they can hold up 3 fingers and fold down 2 to solve for 3 - 2.  They can do they same for 13 - 7.  Both will leave only 1 finger, which will be 1 for the first question and 6 for the second.  The students will be able to jump to the answer instead of counting fingers.

Here is what the schedule will look like:

Class 1: 
Students will:
-learn the connections between numbers that are exactly 5 apart: 0 ad 5, 1 and 6, 2 ad 7, 3 and 8, and 4 and 9.  These numbers share patterns.  
- start working with these numbers by learning to add two small numbers (like 2 + 3) and 2 larger numbers (like 7 +8) with the same pattern.

Class 2: 
Students will:
-review the connections between numbers that are exactly 5 apart.
-practice adding two small numbers and two large numbers.
-learn patterns subtracting some of the smaller numbers (less than 10-5). 

-learn some patterns for subtracting numbers less than 10-5. 

Class 3: 
Students will:
-learn to add with 5's
-learn some patterns for subtracting some numbers up to 18-9 . 

Class 4: 
Students will:
-practice adding all numbers using dot patterns for each.
-learn all patterns for subtracting small and large numbers up to 18. 

 Session 5: 
Students will:
-learn subtraction for 5's.
-practice all patterns for subtracting numbers up to 18-9.
-practice facts in groups that use the same pattern.

 Session 6: 
Students will:
-practice all addition and subtracting facts working on speed. 
-learn the 4 dot patterns and 6 images for multiplying for future learning.

Now if you have read this far, you probably have a lot of questions.  This is fair since this method is not traditional.  There are two things I can promise, though.  First, this is a method I have done for years with great success, even taking students to national championships.  Second, your child will start seeing results the first class.  Young children don't have the same questions or hesitations that adults have.  The skills they learn here will transfer to multiplication and division, making learning the times tables easy and fast.