Math Fact Fluency

Is your child able to easily recall basic math facts accurately and quickly?

Working with him/her to master math facts can help increase your child's self-confidence and improve overall math performance.

One of the most important jobs of parent/advocate for your child is to help him/her to be able to effortlessly recall basic grade-level math facts with accuracy. Students who are able to fluently recall math facts are able to direct their limited thinking capacity toward solving multi-step problems, paying attention to details and self-monitoring of their work.

The need to direct mental effort into figuring out basic facts can affect a child’s daily school success and performance on mathematics achievement tests. In addition, s/he is more likely to more errors when following step-by-step procedures and more likely to struggle to master advanced math concepts. Lack of success in math can affect a child’s self-confidence.

Why do so many students fail with mastering math facts? Lack of practice is one reason. Furthermore, it is not unusual for students to become overwhelmed with too many new facts to memorize at one time. It is also important that children are able to connect number facts to something meaningful. Number sense and an understanding of basic grade-level operations are pre-requisite skills that need to be considered before focusing on memorization of number facts.

Many children need help with developing strategies to successfully master the facts. Focusing on a limited number of new facts at a time, repeated practice, and pairing the new facts with facts previously learned are helpful strategies. Varied repeated practice using different sensory modalities also help with learning and reinforcing math facts.

As a result of working with children of all ages with the goal of learning math facts in a private tutoring situation, I have found that learning facts through different learning modalities can make a difference with a student’s retrieval of number facts and motivation to learn.

Some children experience anxiety with any learning task that incorporates a time component.
Focusing on building skills without the added stress of a visible timer is a way to solve this issue. Some children struggle to verbally recall a fact, but can communicate the answer more quickly through writing, and some children are able to more quickly verbalize the facts. Some children are able to focus, engage for longer periods of time and increase their accuracy when they engage in an activity that involves sorting and matching. Recalling facts with the numbers on a keyboard helps some students to increase retrieval time and accuracy.

All students have different learning styles, interests and preferences. For help with math, I like to offer multiple opportunities to practice facts using different modalities…. the focus of next week’s post.