Fact Fluency for Math RTI

Intervention has been quite the buzz word the last year or so, hasn't it???  At least it has been in my neck of the woods.  Generally, teachers are very comfortable doing intervention in literacy, but what does good, research based intervention look like in math?  I'll be blogging about ways I used intervention in my math instruction last year over the next few days.

#3: Fact Fluency 
Like Counting Collections, during Fact Fluency, my kids are practicing facts and explaining their thinking with partners for about 20-30 minutes depending on the time of year.  {Read about the details of partner practice for fact fluency here.}  Fact Fluency partner practice does take a little more "overseeing" than Counting Collections just to make sure kiddos are really explaining their thinking and not just trying to rush through facts.  This usually means I only meet with one intervention group.  This gives me time to walk around the room every few minutes and give kids that accountability piece.

As with guided reading, most weeks my groups are my lowest babies who are still struggling to understand addition and subtraction.  While every one else works on facts, we do CGI problems to give them context.  This is essentially an additional day of CGI work for these strugglers.  I use my anecdotal records I blogged about in my first blog of the series to know who I need to pull for this.  We work really hard on the difference between addition and subtraction, and how to show their thinking.  What I have found is that in small groups, several of these kiddos actually DO understand the problem and can get the right answer when you just work the problem orally with fingers or tools.  But the disconnect comes when they try and show their thinking on their paper.  That's why they look like they are completely lost when they do CGI independently on their desk...because their paper is a mess! :)  So my interventions center around notating their strategies. {Sorry no pics for this since it's summer...I'll try to update during the school year.}

One math game that I also work on with these kiddos for fluency practice is build, break, notate.  This game is in my print and play math games packet.  It's a great game for building fluency when I'm not practicing CGI problems with this intervention group.

Students roll 2 dice (or 3 or 1 or draw cards...whatever works to make the number ranges you need!)

Then, they draw and label the set, and find two other ways to make the same number and write a number sentence to match.  I've used this in small group informally and with my 1-on-1 tutoring kids.  It's so great for building fluency and flexibility with numbers!  I also love that I can stretch my high kids by having them decompose the number into 3 parts instead of 2!

Again, while most of my intervention time is for my lowest, about 25% of my intervention time is for bubble kids or my highest who need some extension {They get extensions with 2nd grade level facts in partner practice, but they still need my help extending their notation.}  So once or twice a month (fact fluency is only a weekly activity) I will pull a different group during Fact Fluency.

How many RTI minutes am I up to now?  Let's add it up...
CGI: 60 minutes
Counting Collections: 20 minutes
Fact Fluency: 20 minutes
100 minutes and counting! 

And one more RTI Math blog to add later this week! Stay tuned!!

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