In this uncertain time of educating kids, teachers and parents are struggling with how to provide math instruction to kids. I’ve never been a fan of using a textbook to teach math. It can be a great resource, but it shouldn’t be our one and only guide for instruction. Our students should guide the instruction based upon the needs they have at the time. So what kinds of activities should we use to do that? 

I’m Christina Tondevold, The Recovering Traditionalist, and today we’re going to take a look at math experiences that build fluency, not memorization in our quest to build our math minds, so we can build the math minds of our kiddos.

**In this video about Math Activities that Build Fluency, I talk about 3 types of math activities and if you haven’t already watched it, I also did a video about how to do these three activities online with students.  You can check out that video here: https://mathematicallyminded.lpages.co/teaching-elementary-math-online/**

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

Watch all the videos in this Fluency Series:
Video 1: Fast Does Not Mean Fluent
Video 2: Helping Kids Learn Their Math Facts
Video 3: Math Experiences That Build Fluency, Not Memorization  (This Video)
Video 4: Students with Math Fluency
Video 5: The Importance of Visuals in Math
Video 6: The Root of Math Fluency

Now, as I’ve said over these past few weeks, I am not a fan of worksheets or online programs as a way for kids to learn math. But with schools basically closing overnight and teachers having zero time to prepare. And they were scrambling to do the best job that they could to send home stuff to parents, I do not fault teachers at all, if you sent home a packet, or are telling parents to put their kids on an online learning program, because we are all just doing the best that we can in these circumstances. So don’t feel like you are doing a bad job. We are doing the best we can. 

I just want to provide, through this video, a few alternatives to maybe those packets or the online learning programs because mathematics can be so much more than that, and often those worksheets and online programs just become a little too stressful for our kids when we’re trying to help them. So, these three things are things that I recommend, no matter what kind of learning we’re doing.  If it’s the classroom normal type learning, whether we’re trying to move things online, all these are also things that I just personally do with my four kids, even when they’re not at school, just our daily life stuff, I always try to bring out these three things. 

Now, before I go into these three things, I just want to let you know I’ve outlined all of this in more detail inside the free Building Math Fluency Starter Kit that I created. Use the link below or the links in the description to request your kit. There is one that’s for teachers and there’s one that’s for parents. If you’re a teacher and a parent, just request the teacher one because, a little inside hint, we actually send you the parent one as well, because we want to encourage you to share this out to the parents of your students. All right, let’s dive into the three types of activities that will help build your kiddos fluency and not just memorization of math. 

Number Sense

My #1 thing has always been, building number sense for kids. I have whole online courses about how to build number sense for kids. So you’ve got to know this is my number one thing. But how do we actually do that? So again, inside of the building math fluency kit we get you started with it. 

But here’s a couple of my favorite things.  Just having kids estimate. So if you’re in an online setting, you can just send out a little task for the day like “estimate how many beans you think are in a pile.” As a parent, I could just put out a pile of beans and ask my kids to estimate how many they think there are. 

And then we could even go into counting those and having them figure out how many it is, looking to see how they’re counting because counting really is a foundational skill. For my older kids, in my own personal house, I would hope they would try to be counting into some kind of groupings, especially groupings by 10. But my young kid who’s in first grade, he may be just counting 1 by 1 by 1, and that’s okay, that’s where he is. But estimating it first, will help them get a sense of what numbers are like. And that’s one of the foundational pieces for building number sense. 

Another one is using lots of visuals. All too often in math, it’s just the symbols of a 5, or 6, or 7 and kids don’t have a visual to associate with that. Whereas when they’re reading, like if they read ‘cat’, they have a picture to conjure up with that. In mathematics, a lot of our students don’t have that. So check to see, do your students have visuals? If you can, even in an online setting, just ask them to show you a picture of 4, or show you a picture of 6 x 7, and see what they come up with. Do they just write down 6 x 7? Or can they create a visual that goes along with that? You having visuals and creating visuals is a great way to build number sense. 

Another piece that all of those builds is helping kids see how numbers relate to each other. So how does that visual of 5 relate to the visual of 6? How does the visual of 6 x 7 relate to the visual of 5 x 7? Those are big questions to be asking kids.  It’s all about helping them see and talk about how numbers relate to each other. 

Story Problems

My 2nd type of activity is story problems. You can craft your own story problems. There’s lots of story problems out there, but really it can just be from your everyday life. Where are you seeing mathematics? Where could you bring about questions about math? When you’re cooking, and you’re doing brownies, and the recipe calls for a certain amount, and let’s say you’re not making a double batch but you could say, “what if”…“What if I needed to make a double batch of these, how much oil would I need?” If it calls for 3/4 cups of oil, they have to think about what would double that amount be. And basically, you just did 3/4 x 2, you’re doing multiplication with fractions, but in a real life setting.  Let the kids see mathematics in real life areas and through story problems. 

Games

All right, my last favorite activity is games. I am a big fan of games, even games that you don’t necessarily think are math games. But any kind of game gets kids to be talking and discussing and looking at how something relates to something else. So it doesn’t matter if you’re playing Battleship or Blokus or just playing Hangman, or Connect Four. Any of those types of games just get kids thinking and thinking outside of the box, which helps build mathematical fluency, whether you know it or not, it really is. 

So again, inside of the Building Math Fluency Kit we give a lot more examples and links to ways that you can get your hands on story problems and games and some number sense activities. But really, games are just a powerful, powerful way to be able to build thinking skills, but also lots of practice. I would much rather sit down and play a game with my kids because they will do 50 problems in 5 minutes and not even realize that they just did 50 math problems than sit down and do a worksheet with my kids. 

And again, remember, I don’t fault you if you were sending home worksheets because you’re doing the best that you can during this time, but I just want to lay out these alternatives. And if you like these alternatives, go get the Building Math Fluency Kit download because I linked to some of my favorite places to get games, number sense activities, and story problems to help you out because we are all doing the best we can during this time, and I want to just give you some of my favorite resources to help you out. 

So, go get that fluency download, it will get you started. 

It’s not the full “how you build fluency.”  That is a big, big thing that teachers are always working on. It’s not something that happens overnight, but at least we can get started doing these three types of activities. All right. I hope that this video helped you build your math mind so you can go build the math minds of your kiddos. Have a great day.

Pin This To Pinterest for Later