Strategies to Help Build Students’ Math Fact Fluency

Finding time to practice math facts during an already jam-packed school day is a dilemma that many elementary teachers face. While it can be a real challenge to find the time and the ways to get students the fluency practice they need, early and consistent practice can impact accuracy, speed, and also confidence in math.

What Constitutes Fact Fluency?

Math fact fluency is about more than just memorizing facts or racing the clock. True fluency means students can solve problems accurately, efficiently, and flexibly using strategies that make sense to them. It’s about building mathematicians who are confident and strategic, freeing up their mental energy to take on new concepts and challenges. As Jennifer Bay-Williams and Gina Kling explain in Math Fact Fluency: 60+ Games and Assessment Tools to Support Learning and Retention, automaticity grows from reasoning rather than rote recall. Students develop this fluency over time, first mastering foundational facts rooted in patterns and then using those to derive new ones. 

For example, when students know that 4 × 2 = 8, they can use that understanding to find 4 × 3 by adding one more group of four. Speed still has its place and can emerge naturally from meaningful practice and a solid understanding of number relationships. Building fluency in this way, students grow faster and confident while still hanging on to the meaning behind the math.

5 Games That Build Fact Fluency

Playing games with partners can be a great way to fit student practice into the school day. When students play together, they explain their thinking, listen to peers’ strategies, and practice facts in ways that feel like play rather than work. Teaching students a few easy, low-prep games that can be replicated with any set of facts will help squeeze fact practice into even the smallest moments. Consider how you might try these with your mathematicians:

1. Fast and Slow Piles. This works well as a starting or closing activity. Students sort math fact cards into fast and slow piles. This visual way of tracking facts highlights which facts come automatically and which still need strategy work. The slow pile becomes a target list for the next round of games or small group practice.

2. Target Number. Partners roll two dice and use one or more operations to get as close as possible to a target number. Teachers can easily adjust the game by choosing an appropriate target (like 10, 20, 50, or 100), limiting the operations that students can use, or switching out the dice. Try using six-, 10-, or 12-sided dice for different levels of challenge. Players explain their thinking and compare strategies to see who got closest.

3. Four in a Row. Partners take turns drawing two cards or rolling two dice, creating an equation that fits the operation you’re working on (add, subtract, multiply, or divide). They find the sum, difference, product, or quotient and cover that number on a shared board (a basic hundreds chart, grid, or printed template). The first player to get four in a row wins.

4. Ball Toss. Students take turns passing a ball to one another. Each time they pass the ball to a peer, they need to state a math fact within the fact family the class is working in. You can adjust the toss by stating the fact for the students or have the students name the fact for their peers.

5. War. This classic card game supports fact fluency in a cooperative, noncompetitive setting. The deck is split between two students. They each lay a card down at the same time and add, multiply, or subtract the numbers. The first mathematician to state the answer gets to keep all of the cards. In our experience, mathematicians always smile during this game, and many find it helpful to use the symbols on the cards to help them count. Teachers can differentiate this game by choosing the operation or adjusting the deck of cards with certain numbers.

When Do You Implement Fluency Practice?

Yes, all of this practice is important, but where does that fit in with the day-to-day math lessons and routines? At the start of the day, fact fluency practice could be supported during morning work or morning meeting time. During morning work, you can set up a routine where students complete their fast and slow piles when they first enter the room. Have them check in with a partner to discuss the math fact they felt was most difficult that morning. Or they could model a math fact that felt easy for them to solve.

In the routine of morning meetings, incorporate fact fluency games, such as a ball toss or War. Students could skip count for a morning meeting greeting or share a fact that’s hard for them to memorize.

With progress-monitoring routines embedded in the classroom, you can work with small groups at the end of a math lesson (after looking at student data). Creating intentional pockets of time into daily routines will help support fact fluency growth.

How to Track Student Progress

When you establish consistent progress monitoring routines, you’ll help students see their growth and you’ll be able to reflect on instructional routines that will help your mathematicians grow. Creating intentional routines for students to monitor their progress will help them set goals for themselves as mathematicians. When students visually represent their progress—through graphs, charts, or reflection journals—they can make connections between their practice and growth, deepening their understanding of fact fluency.

A bar graph is an effective tool to visually represent student progress. Try a weekly timed task to measure growth. For example, every week, you can measure how many facts can be answered in one minute. The key to this is ensuring that the timed element is presented in a low-stakes and nonpressured setting. The time factor is for students to measure their growth and for you to reflect if instructional strategies need to shift. After three data points, students can celebrate growth individually, through teacher conferencing, or with a partner. When you embed consistent, meaningful progress-monitoring practices, you’re supporting a classroom culture of reflection, goal setting, and continuous growth in mathematical fluency.

The routines and ideas mentioned above may feel like something extra, but it all supports a deep mathematical understanding and number sense. Mathematicians will feel their growth in their day-to-day work.