Does your child hate writing Maths in columns?

If your child gets aggravated when you encourage her to write her Maths in columns, it could be another sign that her working memory is the issue, not her Maths skills. She may be trying to rush through to the end of the question before she forgets what the question was. Here's an idea to make her understand the importance of columns: Get her to test how many numbers you can remember in one go. She can write a list of numbers down on a piece of paper that you can't see; read them out to you and ask you to write them down. She can then check your answers. She will find that you can remember somewhere between 5 and 9 numbers and that, after that, the numbers will start to get scrambled in your mind. When she can see that even adults have a limit on how many numbers they can hold in their brains at one time, she should feel more comfortable about the natural limit on how her own working memory. Then show her this:

By writing in columns, she is minimising the strain on her working memory by working on one piece of a problem at a time, instead of working on a whole line at a time. This leaves more room in her brain for thinking about the problem she is trying to solve.