My daughter is very weak in her math skills. She has learned HOW to find an answer to an addition or subtraction problem, but she has not learned her facts. Is there a more ‘fun’ way to learn the facts? Are flash cards necessary? Or, is using flash cards the best way? And, if you use flash cards, what are some interesting ways to use them. My daughter has some visual processing problems, so just holding up flash cards for her to look at is not going to be very productive.
We’ve used flash cards before but what we’ve had the most success with is the software Math Facts Now. It’s very basic with no distracting sounds or flashy graphics, just the math problems. My older 3 (1st, 2nd, 6th) have been using it for a few months consistently and I can see the progress they’ve made with reports. I individualize lessons for each child so it’s great to hone in one what we need.
I have done flash cards, but we all get bored with them. The favorite drill methods at our house (kids and my opinion) the first two being what we use the most:
Math Wrap-Ups – you can get individual sets, but I bought the whole thing
Schoolhouse Rock videos – I have this DVD, but I have heard they are free on Youtube I think, and when I looked they are free on Amazon Prime
various free iPad apps I’ve downloaded – Rocket Math comes to mind as a favorite
We use xtramath.org too My daughter needed a bit more help in getting her math facts down, and so after 2 years of trying to memorize addition facts, we finally started using a homemade version of rapid recall. (we couldn’t afford the real thing at the time.)
Pam, with the level you have described your daughter working at, you may want to take this year to just give her a comfort working with and exploring numbers using concrete objects and oral questions and wait a bit for her to learn the addition and subtraction facts.
Laura.bora-how do you do your homemade rapid recall? I watched some video’s on Youtube and it looked like they just had the kids read the flashcards with the answers until they could do it without the answers shown. Is there anything else involved? So far that has been working somewhat ok, but I want to know if there is more I could do to help cement the facts.