Teaching Trove

Have you ever handed out a math worksheet and watched your student’s eye glaze over? “Why do we have to do this!” “We did this last week!” “I know how to do this already!” And yes, unless you’re just beginning to teach your class how to regroup with subtraction, they probably do know what to do – most of the… Read More

When a child can answer 7 + 8 quickly and correctly we know they’re developing strategies for number fact retrieval. And when you’ve spent the last two weeks teaching them the mental math strategy – doubles plus one, this quick response is what you want to hear. But is it fluency? What is fact fluency? Fact fluency is more than… Read More

I love it when I know kids are using addition strategies to answer their number facts. You know how it is, at the beginning of the year they’re using a ruler, their fingers or blocks to add 4 + 5 and now you ask them and they answer …within three seconds … no fingers! They can mentally process 4 +… Read More

Do you spend a lot of time teaching the addition strategies but a lot less time on subtraction? No matter what country you teach in,  you will find a mathematics standard that says something like, ‘Fluently add and subtract within 20 using mental math strategies’. This means we need kids to have automatic recall of both their addition and subtraction… Read More