The Best Way to Develop Kids’ Fact Fluency

Fact Fluency | 0 comments

The term “fact fluency” can conjure up lots of different ideas and feelings inside of people. Many people, based upon whether or not they performed well in those fact fluency type assessments, either loved or hated math. It shouldn’t be that way though! Yes, fact fluency is important, but what exactly is it, and how can we develop it for our students?

Today, I would like you to stick around as we investigate what fact fluency is and what’s the best way to develop it for our students, in our quest to build our math minds so we can build the math minds of our students.

Watch the video or read the transcript below.  **Make sure to sign up for the FREE trainings I have coming up about how to help your kids develop fact fluency:

The webinars are over.  All webinar archives are housed inside the Build Math Minds PD site.  The BMM Professional Development site has hundreds of PD trainings all focused on how elementary kids develop their understanding of mathematics.

Become a member of the Build Math Minds PD site

What Is Fact Fluency?

What exactly is fact fluency? Whether we’re talking about addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division, I want to start off on the same level of what we’re talking about for fact fluency.

google fact fluency

Here’s an image that pops up when you Google “fact fluency”, and I’ve got to say that I don’t agree with Google’s definition. I know it’s images, but that’s what people are tagging in their pictures as building fact fluency. If you notice, there’s a lot of worksheets and flashcards, and for a lot of us, these are the ideas and images that come to mind when hearing about fact fluency.

derived facts

However, I’m a big fan of CGI, cognitively guided instruction, and the whole progression of kids who are direct modeling. Those kids who will then move into the counting on phase, or counting back for subtraction, and the final two phases of derived facts and facts. Those last two-phase, if we can get kids there, are in that fact fluency stage. They may not know it instantly, but if they can give you the answer within three seconds, that should be deemed as fluent.

3 parts to fluency

I personally really love Susan Jo Russell’s three-part definition of fluency. One part of the definition is accuracy, another is efficiency, and then the last one is flexibility. Those three things are what makes a child fluent in really anything, not just mathematics. Anything we do in our life, to be fluent in it, you need all three of those parts. But, so often in mathematics, and even in reading, we focus on the first two. We focus on how accurate and how fast kids are, and we don’t really look at the flexibility, a lot of the assessments don’t focus on flexibility. Flexibility is those kids who see 3 plus 4 and if they don’t instantly know it, they have a way to get to the answer that is still accurate and efficient. A lot of kids, if they don’t instantly know it, will drop all the way back down to counting and then counting becomes inefficient. Counting will give you accuracy. You’ll be very accurate when you’re counting, but it doesn’t provide the efficiency. So, for kids to really be fluent, we want to be looking at all three of those parts.

How is it developed?

The important part is how is it developed. If you notice that kids don’t have these three elements, accuracy, efficiency and flexibility, then what should you be focusing on? A lot of times, our textbooks will try to directly teach strategies to kids. In addition, we see a lot of textbooks saying to use your doubles, the doubles plus 1, doubles minus 1, make a 10. In multiplication we will see all of these different strategies like for times 4, just take your times 2s and double it. Well, those strategies only work if the kids have number sense. Number sense is the key to developing your students’ fact fluency. If you’re trying to teach strategies and kids don’t have a sense of numbers, those strategies will just fall by the wayside and they will be right back counting on their fingers.

So, what exactly is number sense? I have a few webinars coming up and I would love to have you join me. There will be a webinar all about getting kids to stop counting on their fingers; the 3 reasons why kids are counting on their fingers when they’re adding. It’s geared for PreK-2 and there’s a link below where you can sign up for it. As I’ve said, the counting phase is one of the phases, but it’s not the phase we want kids to stay in.

So how do we move from those lower levels of direct modeling and counting, to what I deem more of the fluency phases of derived facts and facts, for multiplication? That’s what we’re going to talk about in that webinar. That webinar is geared more for 3rd-5th grade teachers and it’s all about how to move kids up into those two fluency stages around multiplication, and how their number sense is really the determining factor of how kids get up there.

We could just make kids memorize, I learned that way, but that’s not true understanding. If you want to help develop an understanding of your students and also fluency, then come join me for the webinar. I want kids to have a recall of their facts, not just memorization, and quick recall is different than memorization.  I’ll talk more about that on those webinars. I hope that you’ll join me and that this video has given you some insight and helped to build your math mind so that you can go build the math minds of your students.

The webinars are over.  All webinar archives are housed inside the Build Math Minds PD site.  The BMM Professional Development site has hundreds of PD trainings all focused on how elementary kids develop their understanding of mathematics.

Become a member of the Build Math Minds PD site