(Your child should already know the ×2 facts before using this strategy.) Use hands-on manipulatives and visuals to help your child understand both how the mental strategy works and why it works. Manipulatives don’t have to be complicated Legos, blocks, and pennies all work well.įor example, you could use any type of small counters to teach your child to find the ×4 facts by doubling the ×2 facts. Step 1: Teach your child the mental strategy with hands-on manipulatives and visuals. But with this simple, 3-step process, you can help your children master each mental strategy and learn the math facts for good. Of course, just explaining these strategies doesn’t mean that kids will be able to apply them. With this one easy strategy, a child can quickly master all of the ×4 facts– one-ninth of the entire multiplication table! Similar strategies exist for all of the math facts, and they make learning the facts a much more manageable task. To find any of the ×4 facts, you can simply double the matching ×2 fact. For example, take the ×4 multiplication facts. Instead of memorizing each fact individually, it’s much easier for children to learn simple mental strategies that they can apply to groups of math facts. But don’t panic-and don’t start making piles of flash cards for your child to memorize! When children rely solely on rote memorization, the math facts often go straight into their short-term memories and then straight out again. Seeing how many math facts need to be learned can feel overwhelming, both for kids and parents. So, if you have a third-grader who’s shaky on the addition facts, start there before moving on to subtraction or multiplication. However, each operation builds on each other. The math facts are the sums and products of the numbers from 1 to 9, as well as the related subtraction and division problems:Īs a rough guide, aim for your children to learn the addition facts in 1 st grade, subtraction facts in 2 nd grade, multiplication facts in 3 rd grade, and division facts in 4 th grade. Once they’ve learned these basic number relationships, they’re much better prepared to tackle challenging topics in their middle school and high school math courses. That’s why it’s so important that children master the math facts during the elementary years. Whether they’re learning how to divide decimals, subtract fractions, or multiply polynomials, they spend so much of their working memory on simple calculations that they have no brain space left for understanding new concepts. This is how math feels for kids who never master the basic facts: painstaking and hard. Even with a recipe, you would find yourself puzzling over every single step: “Do I need to take the skin off the onion first? How high should the heat be when I cook the meat? What’s the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon?” Imagine trying to make spaghetti sauce if you didn’t know how to chop an onion, brown ground beef, or measure spices.
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