Math Fact Fluency & Why It’s SO Important
What’s the best thing about homeschooling?
We have the freedom to take. our. time.
My daughter is 4, very soon to be 5, and she loves to explore numbers.
She counts everything. Notices the numbers on clocks. Points out numbers on packaging. Makes up outrageous numbers that couldn’t possibly exist (‘six-hundred thousand, twenty-three, seventy, nineteen hundred’)!
Previously, my tendency would have been to immediately provide exposure to more maths, new sums, higher numbers, introduce place value, etc.
However, I’ve recently learned about the power of building ‘math fact fluency’.
Math facts are what we traditionally used to learn through rote memorisation. For example, basic addition or multiplication tables.
However, building math fact fluency in the child, especially in the early years, is more than memorisation. This process provides the child with many strategies and processes to be able to recall the math fact and remember the math fact in the long term.
Memorisation alone does not provide these tools.
Children who take the time to develop fluency in the early years and are not rushed through this process are more likely to have a more secure understanding of mathematical concepts later on.
I learned a lot about this from Neily from Counting With Kids on Instagram who has a whole business developed out of the need to help parents learn about supporting their children with maths at home.
From her Instagram account, I learned about 3 important stages in developing math fact fluency.
The first stage
Counting strategies for addition and subtraction. Here are some examples of what this could mean:
- The child starts from 1 and counts up one by one.
- The child starts from 6 and counts on to 7, 8, 9…
- The child uses their fingers to count down from 10, 9, 8…
In this process, as the child continues to count in different ways and has more exposure to numbers and their relationships with each other, they begin to build number sense.
Number sense is an understanding of numbers and how they work with each other. Within this is the ability to subutise. Subutising is the ability to see a quantity and know immediately how much is in that group. For example, when you roll a dice and it lands on 5 dots, you wouldn’t need to count each dot out one by one – you just know by looking that the quantity is 5.
A secure grounding in number sense is vital to building strong math fact fluency.
The second stage
Reasoning strategies to explain how to get to the solution of an equation. Here is an example of what this could look like:
- What is 3 + 3? The child might have done a lot of finger counting and now knows the math fact that 2 + 3 equals 5. They also know that one more than 5 is 6. So they could reason that 3 + 3 is the same as 2 + 3 plus one more which equals 6.
The third stage
The child has developed fluency. Huzzah! This is the ability to come to the solution of a problem in an efficient way by relying on strong number sense and reasoning strategies.
Neily explains this (along with the other 2 stages) very clearly in her Instagram post:
How does fluency differ from memorization? A child who has fluency with 5+4 might answer, “I just know,” when asked how they came up with the answer and this sounds the same as a child who has memorized it. But if you ask a child with fluency to explain it to a child who doesn’t know it, they’ll be able to explain it using a reasoning strategy, “See this ten frame? If it were full it would be 5+5=10, but it’s one less because it’s 5+4 so it’s 9.”
Counting With Kids
And this leads me very nicely onto 10 frames!
My daughter has absolutely loved using 10 frames recently. She loves the feeling of security in knowing, just by looking, that the frame holds 10.
We have been playing around with this 10 frame recently using an egg carton that I repurposed.
I believe strongly in the connection between the hand and the mind and the importance of letting the child feel quantity in their hand.
My daughter has certainly enjoyed playing with the 10 frame; putting objects in and out, counting up and down, placing them in different positions, and so on.
We even turned it to a vertical position and learned about even and odd numbers (odd numbers don’t have a partner!)
As she has been so interested in the 10 frame games, I created a printable resource to help her build math fact fluency within 10.
This means she can explore all the different ways to make the number 10.
All of the 10 frames are filled in, so she knows that the answer is always 10. However, they are filled in different ways and her job is to find out all the ways you can get to the number 10.
She would match the 10 frame with the equation, which is colour coded as an additional support and built-in control of error (self-checking tool).
Other ways to use this resource:
- Print each 10 frame twice and have child match them up
- Cut out the pieces and have the child place them on top of the frame for additional one-to-one counting practice
- Place counters over the top to cover the squares as a way to introduce subtraction
- Use the blank 10 frame provided to explore other numbers within 10, or print it twice and play with numbers up to 20!
As always, feel free to connect with me on Instagram and let me know how your kids get on!
