How Students Become Better at the Math Facts

I love Stanford and the constant stream of ideas and studies that comes from math research.  The latest of which addresses the #1 concern of the week as parents enter Mathnasium of 4S Ranch. How can I stop my child from finger counting?  The Mathnasium Method definitely has tools to transition off fingers to automaticity through a series of number sense lessons and good ole practice, and we have seen over a dozen of our summer session friends invest their vacation knocking this habit specifically!

So why is fact fluency, fact recall, numerical fluency, fact automaticity (all synonyms for the action of effortless recall of math facts) so important?

"If your brain doesn’t have to work as hard on simple math, it has more working memory free to process the teacher’s brand-new lesson on more complex math."

There you go!  There is so much more math in a young student's life, they have to know their facts so they can focus on problem solving. Mathnasium's Numerical Fluency Curriculum launched in July and the immediate results have been fantastic. Things are clicking for kids as never before.  Older kids, like 4th and 5th graders, who have struggled with basic adding and subtracting skills are making my favorite sound, "OOOhhhhh!"  Connections are made!  For our younger friends on the brink of having multiplication and division added to their math mix, they are gaining steam and confidence while building their automaticity!

How well kids make that shift to memory-based problem-solving is known to predict their ultimate math achievement. Those who fall behind “are impairing or slowing down their math learning later on,” Mann Koepke said. 

Check out the article here:  http://www.pressherald.com/2014/08/18/peek-into-brain-tests-how-kids-learn-math/