What are the best ways to incorporate fact fluency into daily lessons, and what effect will it have on student learning?

Seminar Title

What are the best ways to incorporate fact fluency into daily lessons, and what effect will it have on student learning?

Memory, Numbers

3rd Grade

Elementary

Mathematics

Reading

Do you know fact fluency is important, but don’t know how to incorporate it into your classroom? Are your students always anxious about those timed tests that you are making them do? I was tired of watching my students count on their fingers to add, but I wasn’t going to put them through the stress of timed tests anymore. Something needed to change. Come and discuss how I discovered the best ways to add fact fluency back into the classroom, and how it has impacted my students’ confidence and their math scores!

What are the best ways to incorporate fact fluency into daily lessons, and what effect will it have on student learning? The question guiding my action research is as follows: What are the best ways to incorporate fact fluency into daily lessons, and what effect will it have on student learning? Moving to third grade after starting my teaching career in first grade, and going along with the thought from my undergrad that fact fluency wasn’t that important, I realized the philosophy of my undergrad program was definitely not correct. I saw in third grade how critical it was for students to be able to fluently solve basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. I have seen first hand how timed tests can cause anxiety in students, so I wanted to find out what the best way was to help students become more fluent in basic facts. Through my research I found that the best method to improve fact fluency was to have students practice using flashcards. Although I thought this method seemed a little old school, I decided to give it a try anyway. My initial plan was to have students take a pretest individually with me using flashcards. After the pretest I wanted students to practice with their flashcards at least three times a week for five to ten minutes per day. While I did get all of my students pretested, it did not always happen every week that we had time for them to practice for ten minutes three days a week. The average amount of time we spent per week ended up being about 20 minutes instead of 30. Although I was not able to always have my students practice as much as I would have liked, I have found this method to be more beneficial than my previous method of using the app “xtramath.” At this point in the school year the majority of my students have mastered all of their addition facts, and are now working on their subtraction facts. A handful of my students have mastered their subtraction facts as well, and are working on multiplication. One of my students has even mastered multiplication facts, and is currently working on division facts. I believe that this method has proven to be successful, and I am hopeful that these students can continue to practice their facts to be prepared for next school year and beyond.