60-Second Strategy: Math Fluency Sprints

Saint Marys Area Middle School math teacher Nick Rhoades likes to start his classes off with a number sense routine—a short instructional activity designed to build students’ math muscles through repetitive practice. Post-pandemic, Rhoades noticed students struggling with basic computational skills (like simple addition and subtraction). This was slowing them down significantly when working on multistep problems. Enter math fluency sprints.

Each sprint has 30–45 problems, usually pulled from students’ prior knowledge, “So, things they may have learned in past grades, or from earlier in the school year,” says Rhoades. Students are given a set amount of time to solve as many problems as they can. Once the timer goes off, Rhoades displays the answer key on the board, and students calculate their scores as a percentage (determined by total number of problems attempted, not total number of problems on the page).

“At first, my students don’t like fluency sprints,” laughs Rhoades, “because they think [they] might be high stress. But they learn pretty quickly in my class that I'm sort of turning that on its head and saying, ‘Listen, I would like for you to do problems quickly. But I also want you to do them well.’ So once they realize that there is a lot less pressure to do completion, versus competency, they come around to it pretty quickly.”

This scoring method means students often have high scores, which makes students feel great at the start of class. “It creates an easy entry into the class for the day,” says Rhoades, giving students confidence as they get ready to tackle the day’s more complex problems.

“ I feel like I’ve seen a big difference in my students when it comes to doing mental math,” he adds. “Just seeing them be able to do a problem much quicker in their head than students in previous years… It just helps in the long run, instead of having this conversation all the time about, you know, what is negative 6 plus 12.”

“I look at it like working out,” says Rhoades—the more you get those reps in, the easier it’s going to get. “We try to build fluency in reading. We need to build fluency in mathematics as well.”

To find more number sense routines like Rhoades’s sprints that can be adapted for grades K–8, check out “4 Ways to Make Math Fluency Activities Fun,” by Kurt Stielow.