Apparently this is a thing called Dyscalculia which makes it extremely hard for certain people to visualize numbers and math in their heads.
I realized this was an actual problem for her when i asked her "try to see the numbers in your head" and she kept saying "I can't". At first, i couldn't believe it, and figured she was just being lazy, but the more we tried, the more i realized it was literally just the numbers she couldn't visualize.
To teach my daughter how to work around this, i wrote out numbers from 0 to 20 on letter size paper, then laid them on the floor from a corner in her bedroom, out the hallway, so that the numbers could be associated with places, positions, or physical movement to give her some other way of visualizing the numbers.
This way when i say "Zero" she can visualize "The naughty corner".
And when i say "10" she can visualize "the bedroom door"
This worked unbelievably well. From the moment i laid out the numbers on the floor, her eyes lit up, and you could see that she finally "got" what we were trying to do.
The next step was to get her to know that minus meant "walk toward zero" and plus meant "walk away from zero"
Once we got that down, i told her to shrink herself down to a tiny tiny person, and pretend to walk along the number line instead of the floor.
Within a day, she was able to now do the math in her head simply because of the mental workaround we had to put in place.
Instead of trying to visualize the numbers in an abstract form, she was now able to see them as a road that she could move along and travel in a specific direction. She might take a little longer to figure out the answers, but at least she can do it successfully now, with no more tears and frustration.
In the end however, we had to get a private tutor to provide consistent support, build her confidence, and get her to do it on her own. Within 3 months we were able to get her caught up, and completing all of the work required.
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