When have you achieved math fact fluency?

[MeganW]

At what benchmarks would you consider your child to have truly mastered their math facts and not need to practice them separately anymore?  
- Three seconds per fact, with 90% accuracy?  
- Two seconds with 95% accuracy?  
- One second with 100% accuracy?

Also, how far up do you go?  10s?  12s?  15s?  20s?
 

I have four kids in various stages with this, and am wondering for two of them whether their time would better be spent elsewhere.

 

Thanks!

[Grover]

1.5 sec, 100% three days in a row. 

 

We go to 12.

 

It's not something we stop and wait for - they carry on with other stuff and do 5 min of this per day until they  have it - usually on xtramath.

[KSinNS]

Depends on the kid. 2 of mine have ADD and slower processing speeds so even 3 secs is never going to happen. I watch for functional fluency- so they can add or whatever doing longer problems (multi digit) quickly enough that they don't lose their place, with good accuracy (very few errors), and no finger counting or skip counting.

[KSinNS]

Oh, and we do to 10.

[MeganW]

Never fear, we are definitely carrying on with math textbooks, not holding on this!  I just wasn't sure what a reasonable expectation was, vs beating the dead horse.

Thank you - sounds like one of mine will be excused from daily practice, but the other three need to keep going.  They'll be thrilled.  :)

[SparklyUnicorn]

You could do both.  Just cut back a lot on it and only do it, I don't know, once every two weeks or something.

 

I don't do timed drills. 

[Targhee]

At what benchmarks would you consider your child to have truly mastered their math facts and not need to practice them separately anymore?

When they stop calculating them, asking me, or referring to their times table sheet.

 

I reply frequently to the threads about multiplication facts to share what I wish I would have known when working on this with my oldest. Memorization of facts is not the be all end all. Of course they need to know them to calculate fluidly, but sometimes drilling and quizzing is a waste of time or even counter productive. My oldest failed timed tests repeatedly for three years, and didn't know all her facts by heart until near the end of 6th grade. In the mean time she persisted in challenging math (using a multiplication chart as needed) with difficult and meaningful questions. She currently rocks her AOPS classes and math is her favorite subject. We had to switch the focus from memory drill to application in order for the facts to stick, and we managed to preserve a love of math while doing so.

[aprilleigh]

Two seconds with 100% accuracy two days in a row gets rewarded with dropping to weekly instead of daily. Continued accuracy for a month drops it to monthly, and if the accuracy is still there we just drop it and count it as mastered.

 

If he starts stumbling once we reduce the frequency we go back to the frequency that met with success but extend the number of times in a row he needs to meet that standard before moving forward again.

 

I've never sped it up past 2 seconds per flashcard because by the time we get to monthly he's whipping through them so fast I figure it's not relevant.

 

We went to 20 with addition/subtraction (first grade), and to 12 with multiplication/division (second grade, even though some of them weren't covered until 3rd grade in our curriculum - once he got going he wanted to be done with it).

[MeganW]

Gotcha - THANKS!