March 5th, 2018

How to practise your child’s Math Facts.

It is very important to your children, in Mathematics, to know their number facts, multiplication and division, addition and subtraction and with the demands of the curriculum, as well as your child’s ability to learn and retain these facts, we ask that children practise these at home in order to gain some automaticity in their recall of all facts.

A very simple way to practise these is with a deck of cards.

Addition and Subtraction

Just use the Jack, Queen, King as your anchors and then have the children draw a card from the remaining deck, and see how fast they can subtract that number from 10.

Practise their ability to subtract from 10 and take away the cards they can do automatically, with speed and without using their fingers.  Then continue to practise the remaining cards and continue to eliminate the cards they know so they see progress and don’t waste time working on ones they already know.

Of course, then throw them all back in and go through to make sure they still know them all.

Addition

Start with a pile of cards that you feel are at your child’s level.  The child can turn over two cards and add them as quickly as possible, slowly eliminating the ones they seem to know well and working on the ones they stumble on.

You can also add 3 and 4 and 5 cards as the child progresses and dependent on their needs.

Multiplication

You can use two cards to work on your child’s ability to multiply quickly in their heads.

Division

With division, it is often easier to have a small whiteboard, a piece of paper or good old-fashioned flashcards to practise their facts.  Start with the 2 times table and eliminate quickly the ones they already know and then practice the ones they don’t until they do know them.  Then move onto the 3 times etc. so you and your child know what they need to work on.

Knowing basic facts is very important to a child’s ability to do the problem-solving in class and it takes lots of practice at home in order for most children to know them well.