love to paint

Just the facts, Ma'am!  I can picture a policeman on a tv show from the 1950s saying that to a woman in an a-line dress at the front door with a pad of paper in his hands. If it were only so easy!  Knowing the facts, that is. As a kid, the kinds of facts I learned were my math facts.  I don't remember ever having a hard time learning them.  I just learned them.  I can't remember not knowing them.  I also don't remember my mom quizzing me on them.  At times, I've wondered if my teachers all just gave us a magic pill that gave us the gift of knowing our math facts.  No, not really.  I know they didn't really do that.  But, I do wonder how I learned them. For my kids, learning there math facts has not been easy.  My children are all much more language oriented than number oriented.  As a result, I have been on a quest for several years seeking keys to help unlock this box of knowledge for my kids so that they could acquire a...

He he he...  When I Autumn was in first grade, I switched math curriculum half way through the year.  I searched and searched.   In the process, I looked at Abeka and noticed that they required daily practice of math facts.  I felt like I was already trying to do so much in a day and I pushed it off.  I pushed it off for two years, actually until spring of last year. I realized that we needed to invest time in the memory of the facts.  Without the mastery of the math facts, I knew my children were not going to be able to complete their math assignments in a timely way.  They would end up spending more time on the facts than on the concept of the problem they were working on.  This hadn't happened yet, but I could imagine it happening down the road.  So, I began searching for how to work on their facts with them. I went through the addition deck with Autumn last spring.  When she didn't know a fact, I set it aside in a pile and she was ...