Last week a parent asked Kathleen Gordon, one of our Year 4 teachers, for some assistance in helping his child with maths. As luck would have it, Kathleen had spent the Friday before with some of our other teachers at the uni learning some new techniques and understandings for parent education in maths, and more specifically number sense. Kathleen's reply is a 'must read' for every parent (edited below).
'There is a tension between wanting to reach year level benchmarks and making sure students have established a strong foundation in the basics first. For example, pushing students to memorise multiplication and division number facts before they have a sound understanding of addition and subtraction number facts will result in poor quality understanding of both concepts.
Research shows that rushing on leads to poor performance and anxiety about maths. In the words of a highly regarded maths educator - it's like building the roof of a house before the foundations are complete. You can do it but chances are it will fall over before too long.
This may not be what parents want to hear. There is no quick fix for any child.
Research shows that both using timed practise drills and using strategies to learn number facts are effective. However, when students know and use the strategies, they can recall facts long after tests and use this information to work out extended facts (3 x 2 = 6 so 3 x 20 = 60) and approximation tasks, and hence problem solve effectively.
Our school program supports the learning of number facts in multiple ways including teaching strategies for learning particular number facts and doing regular timed practise drills. The strategies are taught at school and form part of the take home package to practise with as homework.
If students regularly use these strategies and repetitive drills at home and school (rather than just trying to rote learn and memorise the facts) they should in time develop the required fluency.
Some students prefer to learn with visual aids and others with auditory ones. We teach students to find their preferred approach and use it repeatedly. Repetitive activities will help students learn. The kind of repetitive activities you can try include:
- saying the strategy (when appropriate) when writing down the number fact e.g. 'I know that 5 + 5 is 10 so 5 + 6 is one more which is 11' and doing this repeatedly
- recording the strategies for particular number facts (see number 1) on a mobile device such as an iPod and listening to it repeatedly
- make a poster of the tricky facts and put them up where they will be seen (bedroom, on the back of the toilet door etc)
- playing with flash cards (you can make your own, download them from the Internet or buy them from the supermarket for about $10) or fact family cards (available from class teachers)
- playing ‘beat the timer’ games with a set of number facts (allow four seconds for each – ten number facts in forty seconds) play these on paper, on the Internet, CD Rom or iPod (or similar) device
- learning rhyming chants or listening to and signing along to multiplication songs (these can be purchased on the Internet)
Fact family cards which we use in the classroom are available from class teachers. You may like to use them too. They help students see the relationships between addition and subtraction and between multiplication and division. They are also useful because they appear to reduce the amount of number facts to learn - (learn one and get three more for free – i.e.. If I know 2 x 6 = 12, I also know 6 x 2 = 12 and 12 ÷ 6 = 2 and 12 ÷ 6 = 2 ).'
This is fantastic advice for any parent wanting to help their child 'know what to do' when faced with a mathematics problem - and these problems present themselves everywhere in life, too - at the supermarket (or anywhere money is used in a transaction), when calculating quantities of an item required for a project, when estimating time for bus timetables or the number of days until the holidays. Maths is everywhere - and fluent number sense kids can navigate these situations with ease.
'There is a tension between wanting to reach year level benchmarks and making sure students have established a strong foundation in the basics first. For example, pushing students to memorise multiplication and division number facts before they have a sound understanding of addition and subtraction number facts will result in poor quality understanding of both concepts.
Research shows that rushing on leads to poor performance and anxiety about maths. In the words of a highly regarded maths educator - it's like building the roof of a house before the foundations are complete. You can do it but chances are it will fall over before too long.
This may not be what parents want to hear. There is no quick fix for any child.
Research shows that both using timed practise drills and using strategies to learn number facts are effective. However, when students know and use the strategies, they can recall facts long after tests and use this information to work out extended facts (3 x 2 = 6 so 3 x 20 = 60) and approximation tasks, and hence problem solve effectively.
Our school program supports the learning of number facts in multiple ways including teaching strategies for learning particular number facts and doing regular timed practise drills. The strategies are taught at school and form part of the take home package to practise with as homework.
If students regularly use these strategies and repetitive drills at home and school (rather than just trying to rote learn and memorise the facts) they should in time develop the required fluency.
Some students prefer to learn with visual aids and others with auditory ones. We teach students to find their preferred approach and use it repeatedly. Repetitive activities will help students learn. The kind of repetitive activities you can try include:
- saying the strategy (when appropriate) when writing down the number fact e.g. 'I know that 5 + 5 is 10 so 5 + 6 is one more which is 11' and doing this repeatedly
- recording the strategies for particular number facts (see number 1) on a mobile device such as an iPod and listening to it repeatedly
- make a poster of the tricky facts and put them up where they will be seen (bedroom, on the back of the toilet door etc)
- playing with flash cards (you can make your own, download them from the Internet or buy them from the supermarket for about $10) or fact family cards (available from class teachers)
- playing ‘beat the timer’ games with a set of number facts (allow four seconds for each – ten number facts in forty seconds) play these on paper, on the Internet, CD Rom or iPod (or similar) device
- learning rhyming chants or listening to and signing along to multiplication songs (these can be purchased on the Internet)
This is fantastic advice for any parent wanting to help their child 'know what to do' when faced with a mathematics problem - and these problems present themselves everywhere in life, too - at the supermarket (or anywhere money is used in a transaction), when calculating quantities of an item required for a project, when estimating time for bus timetables or the number of days until the holidays. Maths is everywhere - and fluent number sense kids can navigate these situations with ease.
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