Reading came amazingly easily to Rebecca.  She was reading 300-500 page novels in kindergarten.  Math, on the other hand was more of a challenge.  It's not that she had difficulty, it just didn't come effortlessly like reading did and so she balked.  Memorizing math facts was a chore.  A long.drawn.out.never.ending.battle kind of chore.  Some time in the first grade I made up a little chant for Rebecca to repeat when she became recalcitrant.  It went like this:

I love math.

Math is fun.

I want to do math EVERY DAY!

I mostly wanted to keep her from spiraling into a black hole of "I can't do this" or "I don't want to do this" and making it a battle.  Whenvever I pulled out the chant we would repeat it until giggles ensued.  It usually worked! 

Today we updated her chant.  She keeps telling me she is "terrible" at math.  Oh, puh-lease!  The child, age wise, is in the eighth grade and is working in Saxon Algebra 2.  She is slated to finish CALCULUS her sophomore year!  The problem is, she's a perfectionist and if she doesn't understand a topic instantly she becomes...frustrated isn't quite the right word.  That would imply some actual effort went into it.  She looks at a problem and sees something puzzling and instead of jumping in, she starts thinking, "Oh, this is hard," and there it ends.

So, today we made up a spiffy new chant:

This was actually inspired during chemistry when we were doing some basic dimensional analysis.  She, herself, pointed out the fact that Saxon has had us doing this about a thousand times in the past couple of years.  She said it with a smile, recognizing her own absurdity and thus was born her new chant.

I don't actually believe that these chants will make her think that math is fun or easy.  I just want to remind her that attitude affects performance.

Of course, once Rebecca had a chant, Elizabeth and Joshua wanted one, too. 

Elizabeth does the NEATEST work you will ever see--it's art, truly.  She retains what she learns and, as far as math goes, is self taught.  However...

Here is Elizabeth's chant:

I am not a turtle.

I CAN focus and pay attention.

It doesn't have to take ALL DAY to do ONE math lesson. 

And Josh's:

I am not a sloth.

I CAN get up in the morning without help.

I want to go to college some day.

Uhm, I think that's self explanatory!