How to Teach Math Facts

With Thanksgiving and Winter Break approaching, this is the perfect time to help your child develop their math facts. With a little extra time available, you can work through some of their facts and help them to really develop a sense of numbers. Math facts are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that your child should know quickly and easily. Children learn addition and subtraction through 10 during first grade, with addition and subtraction through 20 during second grade, and multiplication and division are the focus of third grade.

Our Favorite Games

We love to work on our math facts within our day! Find those places naturally where you can add in some practice without a lot of extra work. We love to use car rides, while we are cooking, and of course clean up time. If you struggle to fit in time naturally, it’s okay to plan for small amounts of time in your day. Think times where your child already has your full attention like bath times or when you are driving around.

While flashcards can definitely be helpful, we like to repurpose them and use them within games. We find that by turning them into games, our children are more likely to enjoy the practice and want to practice. Technology is amazing too!

Add to Your Routine

1. When you having just a few minutes or are out driving around, practice skip counting by different numbers. Skip counting by 4 teaches the x4 facts, but also teaches plus 4 facts too. If you are working on times, have your child hold up a finger for each number said, this will show them what they are multiplying by. Don’t forget to try skip counting backwards too – this really focuses on division. If your child isn’t ready for skip counting, counting to 20 and back from 20 really helps develop an ease with numbers.
2. The clean up game – what could be better than practicing math facts while your children clean up their own toys? Have your child clean up either two different sets of toys (9 toys and 8 books and have them find the total) for addition or clean up multiple sets of toys (4 sets of 5 and ask them to find the total) for multiplication. Throughout, you can work on subtraction by having them figure out how many more toys they need to clean up. Learn more with our Clean Up Math Game post.

Quick Ideas

1. Guess my Number. Have your child pick a number and then give math fact clues to help you guess the number. To make the game longer, you can always have the guesser ask math facts to try to figure out the number too. If my number is 12, I might give the clue 3 times something equals my number. Another clue would be my number can be divided by 2.
2. There are lots of different apps for math facts too! We are partial to Xtra math because it’s free and our teachers use it. This app systematically introduces math facts and quizzes your child on their facts in a quick 5 – 10 minutes a day. In addition, you can set the time to figure out the facts to 3 seconds or 6 seconds. But there are many other ones out there to explore too.
3. Play with fact families. We love to use magnets to make a fact on our refrigerator. Then our kids need to rearrange the magnets to make a different math fact using the same numbers. This is great for showing the addition/subtraction relationship and the multiplication/division relationship as well as the addition/multiplication relationship. For example, start with the fact 4 + 2 = 6. Your child can rearrange these into 2 + 4 = 6, 6 – 4 = 2, or 6 – 2 = 4. They may even decide to look for other ways to make 6 like 3 + 3 = 6.

Dot Cards for Math Fact Fluency

We love to use dot cards to develop the conceptual understanding for math facts. For addition and subtraction, make anywhere from 3 – 20 dots on a note card. Then ask your child to think of as many different ways to show the dots as possible, taking the time to write the equations with them. With multiplication and division, try using arrays or lines of dots for any number of dots up to 100. You can even leave some dots missing from the array to challenge your child.

We love using Dot Markers to make these cards easily. With dot markers, you can quickly create dots on the note cards in any arrangement. You can even add multiple colors to encourage your little one to look at a problem a specific way.

With addition and subtraction, you may wish to make some of the dots one color and the other dots a different color. This might help your little one see a specific math fact that they are struggling with or group the dots a specific way. For multiplication and division, you may wish to use a different color for the first row or column to help your child see the array or even color code each column by alternating colors.

Not sure you want to make them, that’s okay too. You can print a variety of Dot Cards premade to use with your child. These are a little smaller, so you may wish to glue them on a note card. However, if your child doesn’t mind the size, try printing on card stock to make them a little more durable.

Longer Games

We love to use some longer games when we have a bit more time with our children. These games can take anywhere from 10 – 30 minutes to play. They make a great family game night addition or even a pre-family game night activity. We have seen that we can even mix and match by allowing our younger ones to add while our older ones need to multiply.

Card Games

1. Mathematics War card games. We love to grab a deck of cards, take out the face cards (jacks, queens, and kings). Then we play a game of war, but instead of highest number wins, we need to add or multiply the two cards together and the first to say the answer wins. You can do something similar with dice if you need numbers 6 and lower.
2. Challenge Double War card game. You can add a challenge to war by asking each person to flip over two cards. Decide if you will play as addition, subtraction or multiplication. Then find the sum, difference, or product. The person with the largest number wins all the cards.
3. Go Fish. There are a few ways to play this game, but our favorite is to go fish for a sum or product. For this game instead of asking for a number, ask if the other person has two cards that add to 7 or multiply to 12. Your only way to get rid of cards is when you give them to another player, so you need to know your facts. Another option is to try to make a specific number like 10 or 24. Then you can make your own pairs in your hand or ask for a specific number to make a pair.

Bingo

1. Fact Bingo. Create bingo cards using sums for addition, difference for subtraction, products for multiplication, or quotients for division. The calling card numbers are the math problems. Or you can create bingo cards with the facts and have the answers be the calling card numbers. The first way gives 1 correct answer, but the second way may have multiple correct answers for a given number (think of all the ways to multiply to 24). The best part, you can give your child a blank board and each person can create their own card.
2. Flashcard Fact Bingo. Instead of creating the bingo cards, just use the flashcards that you have. Lay the flashcards out to create a 5 by 5 board. This is your bingo card. If you have a second set of flashcards, you could use these as your calling cards.

Visual Ideas

1. Domino Math. Using a set of dominoes, have your child pick up two or more dominos and find the sum, difference, or product using the dots on the domino. You could also have your child find the sum, difference, or product each time they add a domino to another. Not only does this focus on math facts, but it also gives a visual tie to it as well.
2. Playdough Math Facts. Using playdough, which can be store bought or handmade, roll out little balls to solve different math fact problems. This method works for any type of math fact, including division. Plus it’s a very visual strategy so your little on can see the problem, touch the play dough balls, and rearrange them into sets of 10 or groups.
3. You can even use the playdough to make the math fact as well. A set of number cookie cutters is magic here. Roll out the playdough, then use the cookie cutters to stamp out numbers. Rearrange those numbers to make math facts and fact families.

Add a Challenge

1. Play a dice or number spinner board game with facts. For this game, each child gets to roll to dice or spin the spinner twice. Then they need to add, subtract, or multiply the numbers to determine how much they move on the board game. Board games are great for family bonding and learning so many skills, so why not incorporate math facts into the game. Plus, if you multiply, the game goes by so fast and opens up so many different possibilities that really make your children think.
2. 101 and out (or 1001 and out if multiplying). Children roll a dice and decide if they want to use that number or ten times that number (so a 5 can be 5 or 50). Then they add the numbers to their previous total trying to get as close to 101 without going over. If you a multiplying, use two dice and multiple them together then decide if you want to use that number or ten times that number (so if you roll a 2 and 3, you could use 6 or 60). Add this to your total as you try to get to 1001. If you want to work on subtraction, start at 100 and try to get as close to zero by subtracting each new number.

Final Thoughts on Math Facts

The most important thing is to keep math facts low stress! Incorporate them into your day, and keep it simple – a few minutes here and a few minutes there. If your child gets tired or dislikes a certain game, there are so many other ways to learn facts. Instead of giving up, give a different strategy or a different game a try. Hopefully you can find at least one way to practice math facts just a little every day.

Something simple as picking a math fact or number of the day can go a long way. If you pick a math fact, ask your child that fact throughout the day. On the other hand if you pick a number, brainstorm with your child all the different ways you can get to that number. If the number is 24, they might say 20 + 4, 3 x 8, or even 100 – 80. All of these are working on fact fluency even if your child doesn’t give a specific fact.

And please don’t give up! Fact fluency is so important to finding success with later math concepts. We only have so much working memory when we do anything. This means that if we are using our working memory to figure out the facts, we have less memory to use for things like long division, solving algebraic equations, or even figuring out sales and discounts. It’s the same reason we want our children to learn phonics, spelling and letter formation. For more math strategies, head over to our post on Learning Math in Spanish.

We love it if you would leave a comment below and let us know which math fact game or strategy you found most helpful. Looking for more fun ways to solve real life problems in a practical way, subscribe to our newsletter below. We throw in a freebie from time to time too!

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.