Games for Educators

The ease of practicing math facts using flash cards makes them tempting. However, beyond the psychological damage that occurs with overly-enthusiastic drill, using flash cards misses out on learning important relationships between numbers. Feel free to use flash cards to give focused practice for a small handful of facts, but please keep the practice limited and relaxed.

This page and the next have methods that practice structural insights that are useful and far more interesting to your child, and they should be used until the facts become automatic.

Your student should know how to mentally do the following:

• Add and subtract 0, 1, 2 (and perhaps 3)
• Do adding twins and near twins (e.g. 4 + 4 and 4 + 5)
• Know the number bonds for 10 (e.g. 1 + 9, 2 + 8, 3 + 7, 4 + 6)
• Add 10 to single-digit numbers (e.g. 10 + 3 = 13)

If your student is weak with any of these skills, this is the time to solidify those skills some more.

Compensation is a powerful tool for making mental math easier. When adding two numbers, you can get the same sum by shifting over part of one number to the other. Adding 8 or 9 is easy using compensation. For example, adding 6 + 9 by shifting 1 from the 6 to the 9, produces 5 + 10. Similarly, 4 + 8 becomes 2 + 10.

Use compensation from twins and near twins for the remaining math facts: 3 + 5, 3 + 6, 4 + 7,and 5 + 7. For example, 5 + 7 is the same as 6 + 6 by taking 1 from the 7 and giving it to the 5.

Many math facts can be done several ways. Challenge your students to find more than one way to do problems. For example, 5 + 7 can become 6 + 6, but it can also become 2 + 10. This math play will lead to lasting insights.