When I was in Year 4 my teacher would line us all up on a Friday morning for the times tables competition - you were the winner if you were the last one standing. I knew my tables VERY well - I practised them over and over and on a Friday morning was fast and accurate and most weeks was one of the last left standing.
I also had multiple routes for getting right answers to 'problems' such as 73-49=...well, 3-9 you can't do so you add 10 here, and you add 10 there, and then it's 13-9 and 7-5 and the answer is 24 - simple!
My strategies for calculating and memorising stood me in good stead until senior secondary school.
Year 11 and 12 maths was a nightmare as I struggled to apply what I had memorised to problems presented by the teacher or the text book. I could no longer memorise everything I needed to know to be successful, and like many kids, I grew to hate maths passionately.
Modern mathematics teaching focuses on children developing conceptual understanding and flexible thinking, that is, fluency - they need to understand why, for example, double 5 is 10, and how knowing that is important to understanding larger more complex numbers.
I sat with a couple of Year 3s the other day and talked with them about numbers. I wrote down on paper a 6 and a 9, and asked them - 'what is the sum of 6 and 9?' One went straight to his fingers by counting out 6 fingers, folding them over and counting on another 9 fingers. This is certainly not a strategy a student who is fluent with addition facts would use. The other child studied the numbers for a bit and then said, 'It's 15...yes, 15.' I asked her how she came up with that without counting. She looked at me and said 'I just took 1 off the 6 and added it to the 9 to make 10; that made a sum 10+5 and that's easy - it's 15'.
The second child demonstrated the thinking our teachers are striving to develop - she was fluent, she understands place value, addition and the associative property between numbers in order to arrive at a correct response - she was efficient, accurate and flexible in her thinking, all in a matter of a few seconds. The first child may well have arrived at the right answer eventually but without the key ingredient of actually fully understanding the properties of the numbers he was working with.
Developing fluency in numeracy has been a major strategy for development at Peregian Springs State School this year. We have been lucky enough to work with an esteemed educator in the field, Rob Profitt-White. If you are interested in these ideas you may like to listen to one of our teachers, Chris Wise, interviewing him on the topic - Fluency in Numeracy.
So when you are next helping your child with their number facts homework, ask them to explain how they arrived at their answer, rather than simply focussing on whether they give you the 'right' answer in the shortest amount of time. Thinking deeply about numbers takes time to develop and if you can do this, being the last one left standing on a Friday morning is not all that important.
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