My students LOVE practicing their mental math skills, especially while walking down the hall, or waiting for PE to start. Some of their favorites include adding 11s, subtracting multiples of 10, and regrouping tens and ones. The beauty of these mental math exercises is that we can seamlessly differentiate the math and the numbers to be sure all of our students are successfully challenged.

~ Kate Bonsignore, Grade 2 Teacher, Weston Public Schools, Weston, MA

Mental Math exercises are whole class, lively, brief, and focus on skills practice to build students’ computational fluency. These exercises are done orally with children responding aloud.

Mental Math exercises:

  1. Build students’ computational fluency and math facts quickly
  2. Work students’ executive function skills (specifically working memory which is related to overall math achievement)
  3. Develop algebraic habits of mind and explicitly use properties of operations strategically to help students’ fluency

Mental Math exercises are very short and highly focused drills, spaced out over time—a few minutes a day rather than aggregated into a single lesson. Each exercise is intended to be lively, with no instruction “wrapped around” it – and because the exercises are focused, not random, children build ways of thinking about computation as well as fluency with the facts.

Mental Math exercises are designed to be used flexibly. Teachers may search by grade level(s) and then by topic(s) to choose exercises that best meet their students’ needs. Children, in turn, enjoy the energy, pace, and the competence they gain!

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Found 90 Results

July 29, 2020

Adding 22 in Chains

July 29, 2020

Reading Numbers in the Ten Thousands

July 29, 2020

Reading Numbers in the Hundred Thousands

July 29, 2020

Adding 19

July 29, 2020

Adding 25

July 29, 2020

Estimating Two-Digit Sums and Differences

August 1, 2020

Adding to 10 and 20

August 2, 2020

Connecting Multiplication and Division Facts

August 2, 2020

Multiplication and Division Sentences

August 2, 2020

Multiplying by Multiples of 10

August 2, 2020

Skip counting and multiplication

August 2, 2020

Naming Fact Families

August 2, 2020

“If We Know…”

August 2, 2020

Skip counting by 7 and 49

August 2, 2020

Sums to 100

August 2, 2020

Multiplying by 100

August 2, 2020

Multiplying by Multiples of 10

August 2, 2020

Reading and Writing Large Numbers

August 2, 2020

Making Angles

July 31, 2020

Compute Mental Math Chains