If you are looking for intervention help in teaching addition facts, I highly recommend Addition Facts That Stick. While I have developed a lot of strategies for multiplication fact fluency , I haven’t seen as many for addition fluency. However, I have noticed many older kids, and even adults, are not fluent in their addition facts.
When looking for help for a third grader who couldn’t seem to learn the facts, I ran across this book by Kate Snow, Addition Facts That Stick. This easy to use program introduces six strategies based on ten frames, along with a game per week, to teach all the addition facts within 20. The book is designed to be completed in 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks.
After reading the following amazon review I decided to try it:
Guys, this works! Best $12 I’ve ever spent. I am still in disbelief.
We have tried everything, traditional flash cards, tri-corner flash cards, cuisenaire rods, computer games, dice and card games, wrap ups, 3 different math curricula over the past 3 years…and my second grader most of the time still struggled to recall 2+1 on a flash card. Blank stares. She couldn’t finish a worksheet with 5 of the simplest problems on it without a LOT of coaxing, reminding, refocusing. Blanking out, freezing up.
I did this with at the same time with both a second grader and a kindergartener who had zero formal math training. They BOTH get the process and can finish a 24 problem worksheet in under 5 minutes with 100% accuracy with zero interference from me. I am blown away. The only thing I did differently was practicing “visualizations” daily. I’d set up a problem on the 10 frames, flash it to them for a few seconds, and they would write the problem and the answer on their worksheet. We did this for 10 problems daily, and by week 5 my math-hating child said, “Why do you mostly just give us easy problems now?” Because they’re mostly all easy now! It is fast, simple, FUN, requires very few resources, and it WORKS.
After reading that review I got the book and the first week was stunned at how well my student did. He also enjoyed it more than I expected. He has some learning challenges and didn’t learn all of the facts as easily as the kids in the review. However, it did work better than anything else we have tried. We’re going over it again, at a slow pace, and he is getting it! Even better, the strategies taught easily lend themselves to teaching place value and applying the facts known to larger numbers. I look forward to using it with other students.
Here are some pictures of my student’s work during the first week using this book. Because I have foam ten frames I used those rather than the printed ones with counters.
The author’s blog, Kate’s Homeschool Math, has a post with explanations of the six strategies taught in the book. The post also includes a youtube video demonstrating them.
Kate Snow has experience as a homeschool parent, classroom teacher, and curriculum writer. She holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Harvard University and an M.S. in Elementary Education from Walden University. She has also written books for subtraction and multiplication, but I have not personally used those yet.
To buy on Amazon please use this link
