Parent Workshop Hosted By: Mrs. Laura Aagaard & Mrs. Anna VanEtten, AIS Teachers Hagan Elementary School, SUFSD This workshop is being offered to communicate the importance of math fluency and to share ideas about various math activities that will help build your child's math automaticity and understanding of basic math concepts.

Goals for this workshop: Communicate the importance of math automaticity with parents/guardians Demonstrate and share math activities as an alternative to flashcards that also promote math fluency & automaticity Expose parents to a plethora of math websites that provide additional support in learning basic math facts

Stages of Learning Math Facts: Accuracy (answer correctly with time & concentration) Fluency (answer accurately and quickly) Automaticity (answer instantly, without having to think about them) (Mastering Math Facts, Donald B. Crawford Ph.D., Otter Creek Institute, 2003)

Latest Research on Math Fluency Educators and cognitive scientists agree that the ability to recall basic math facts fluently is necessary for students to attain higher-order math skills. Grover Whitehurst, the Director of the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES), noted this in his research during the federal Math Summit in 2003: “Cognitive psychologists have discovered that humans have fixed limits on the attention and memory that can be used to solve problems. One way around these limits is to have certain components of a task become so routine and over-learned that they become automatic.” (Whitehurst, 2003)

Understanding Mathematical Knowledge Declarative knowledge is defined as an interrelated network of relationships containing basic facts and their answers, such as 5+4=9 or 9-5=4. Facts are stored in this network at varying strengths and the strength determines how quickly the facts are retrieved. Hence, the stronger the relationship, then the more readily and effortlessly answers are retireved. Procedural knowledge is defined as the methods used to formulate answers for problems without pre-stored answers. An example of procedural knowledge would be when a student counts up from an addend in a given addition problem to find the sum using his or her fingers. It is important to note that while correct answers can be obtained using procedural knowledge, these procedures are often slow, may lead to computational errors, require more effort, and can sometimes interefere with learning and understanding higher-order concepts.

Why Practice Math Facts? Practicing math facts is important so that students can develop rapid, effortless, and errorless recall of basic math facts. This level of learning is called automaticity. If a student relies solely on procedural knowledge, less of that student’s thinking capacity can be developed to higher–order mathematical skills such as multi-digit operations, long division, and fractions just to name a few. Rapid math fact retrieval has also been shown to be a strong predictor of performance on mathematics achievement tests (Whitehurst, 2003).

Math Games Plus Game – The object of this game is to get the highest total for 10 rounds using addition. Make a Square Game - The object of this game is to form a square with four disks. Players can practice using all four operations. Division Line Up Game - The objects of this game is to get three disks in a row either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally using the operation of division. Place Value Roll – The object of this game is to be the first player to reach 99 or more. This game allows players to practice addition and also reinforces place value. Dice Combo – The object of this game is to be the first player to reach exactly 100 points. Players practice using addition, subtraction, and multiplication. (Note: We will send home these games to those who replied that they are viewing this online.)

Make A Square

Place Value Roll

Math Websites web/games/Mathmagician/mathsadd.html web/games/Mathmagician/mathsadd.html fusion/games/game_addition_attack.html fusion/games/game_addition_attack.html

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