Math Games That Build Fluency While Kids Have Fun

Vicki Davis (00:01): Math games that build fluency while kids have fun. This is a Wonderful Classroom Wednesday, episode 962. Now that we’re five days a week, I’ve got all kinds of free resources attached to every episode. So this is episode 962. You can go to coolcatteacher.com forward slash E962 and get all the free resources to bring these ideas to your classroom.

Announcer (00:29): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:33): Math can be fun. Today, we’re talking to two leaders in math education, Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams and Dr. Gina Kling, who can help us see just how fun math can be. Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams is a national leader in mathematics and a lead writer to the AMTE Standards for the Preparation of Teachers of Mathematics. She’s authored 18 books, and she is co-author with our other guest today, Dr. Gina Kling, of Math Fact Fluency. And those of you watching on YouTube and TV, I’m holding up their book, which has 60-plus games and assessment tools to support learning and retention. Jennifer, am I right? Did you say the word “math” and “games” on this same cover of the book? And is that possible?

Jennifer Bay-Williams (01:22): It’s not just possible. It’s really best practice. Playing a game to learn basic facts is fun. Also, students are in a low-stress environment where they’re working with a peer playing the game. So they’re actually getting a lot of practice. And if they get stuck or they don’t know what to do, their friend can give them a tip or an idea to figure out the fact. In the end, they learn their facts better and they have a stronger, positive feeling towards math learning.

Vicki Davis (01:52): While I ended up loving math, I’ll admit we used to do the round the world thing, and the hardest thing I ever learned was math facts. It was harder to me than calculus because I struggle with memorization. And I just remember getting physically ill, where you would get up out of the desk and whoever got the fact the fastest could advance. It just drove me crazy. Do all of the games, Jennifer, have to be stressful, or can they actually be fun?

Jennifer Bay-Williams (02:14): I love this question. And I’ve taught pre-service teachers, elementary teachers in particular, for 30 years. And when I ask what is their worst memories of math, that around the world comes up all the time. It has caused so much distaste for math. That’s the softest term I can give it — anxiety on the other end.

It’s such a bad practice. Let’s eliminate the bad practices first. The games in the book, none of them have that competitive, be-fast component to them. Their strategy, like low stress. So for example, they use simple dice, simple cards. You would turn over a card or roll a dice to solve your problem to get like a spot on the game board. And then it’s my turn and I roll the dice and solve my own problem to find my spot on the game board. I’m not competing with you either, Vicki. We’re just playing the game. And then the winner is the random person that’s rolling well that day.

It’s their strategy in the games that are fun. But the key of the games is to make sure they’re not about speed, because when students are under pressure to be fast, it blocks their thinking. To be clear, they will end up automatic and fast with their facts through this low-stress, engaging, game-based approach.

Vicki Davis (03:23): We’ve talked about around the world, but what about timed tests? What’s your opinion? Let’s go there.

Jennifer Bay-Williams (03:29): Timed tests need to be abandoned.

Vicki Davis (03:31): Really?

Jennifer Bay-Williams (03:32): Is that a good enough answer?

Vicki Davis (03:33): Completely out the door. Give us the whys.

Jennifer Bay-Williams (03:36): The intention of using them is to make kids faster. Using a timed test doesn’t make a child faster. It can make them anxious. You think about that around the world feeling you have. The timed test is like, I’ve got to hurry up. When you feel stressed, you just can’t think through things. What I’ve noticed in watching students under time pressure is they really drop back to a more primitive strategy like skip counting or counting, instead of taking the time to think through a more efficient way to get to the answer. Those timed tests are actually not supporting their progress forward, can be emotionally challenging. They’re ineffective.

The third reason I would say — when we get the results of that timed test and we see that they got six times seven incorrect, we don’t really know why. And when they get it correct, we don’t know if they were skip counting still or if they just knew the answer. The evidence that we get from those tests don’t really help us help the student to really master their facts, to become good at their facts. So it’s not a useful assessment tool for teachers either.

So there’s so many better options out there. Could we just abandon the tests that have been creating such negative feelings about mathematics for decades? Could we please just not use those anymore?

Vicki Davis (04:46): Wow. Gina, what do you want to add?

Gina Kling (04:47): Yeah, I think, you know, a really important idea, too, to think about are the messages we give to kids. And if we do these great games and, like, number sense routines are very popular to use as well, and we give this message that, hey, we value your thinking, we value your creativity, your strategies — then we give a timed test. We’re no longer giving the message that we value their thinking and creativity and problem solving. That’s confusing, right? It’s confusing to any of us to get mixed messages, but that’s really confusing to kids.

It muddies the waters of what it means to be fluent and what we value in terms of them being mathematicians. I mentioned earlier our definition of fluency. Yes, accuracy and efficiency are part of that. Flexibility and appropriate strategies are the other two components. And so, as Jenny mentioned, timed tests don’t give us a measure of all of those things. In fact, I question whether they give us a measure of any of those things, because so many kids just shut down when given a timed test. And then we can’t even see their accuracy.

I remember years ago doing professional learning with some teachers, and this one teacher said, “Well, you know, I’ve noticed the kids know their facts when they play their games, but then when I give them the timed test, they don’t know their facts.” And it’s like, well, why give them the timed test then? Like, you already knew it from the gameplay.

None of us are looking for more things to do. We don’t have enough time. We have to be strategic with what we’re doing and making sure that our assessments align with what it is that we value in our teaching. Jenny pointed out also, we need to give teachers alternatives — game observation, interviews, strategy writing. There’s so many different ways that we can get better data. It’s not that we don’t need to assess where our kids are at. We can get better assessment data through other.

Vicki Davis (06:29): I just remember the sick feeling of my first timed test. It was half done. I remember going home and saying, “I know the facts. It’s just when she called time.” And then we just spent so much effort on getting me faster. I’ll even tell my students now, be real careful about judging yourself in what you think you do at math, because I loved algebra. I adored calculus. Help me understand why calculus at Georgia Tech is more doable and less stressful than math facts in first grade.

Here’s the thing about timed tests is that when you turn that timer off and you just hand it to them and ask them to do it, a lot of times they get it done faster than you would have timed them for anyway. If a kid needs the time, they use it. If they don’t need the time, they don’t use it. Honestly, I don’t really even understand why we time things like the SAT, especially now that it’s electronic. Kids tend to use the time that they need.

Jennifer Bay-Williams (07:26): So Vicki, you’re probably in a very small minority of somebody that made it to calculus when you didn’t fare well with timed tests. And that’s one of the problems — is people decide when they’re six that they’re not good at math because of the timed test. That’s another compelling reason to not use them.

When I ask teachers, why are we using them in any ways if they’re not good formative assessments and they cause anxiety and you don’t get good data from them? And the answers I get are, we don’t have anything else to use. Our book has two chapters on that. It’s what we’ve always done. Let’s change that. That hasn’t been working for us.

The thing you just mentioned, the end-of-year exams, which are timed — but they’re not timed like a timed test. You’re not doing, let’s see, 20 problems in one minute. They’re set up with 45 minutes, which is plenty of time to solve those problems if you’ve really learned those math topics. And a lot of states have canceled the time factor, and now schools are dealing with another problem, that those tests just linger on and take more of their instructional time because there’s no time limit on them.

So that’s a whole different phenomena, the end-of-year exams, and certainly not an explanation of why they need timed tests. You know, you can’t be talking about the SAT they’re going to take when they’re juniors in high school as a reason to put a, you know, six-year-old under a timer to solve, you know, 60 problems as fast as they can.

Gina Kling (08:45): And I could add on to that. There was an example this winter. I was working in a school district and a kindergarten teacher said, “Well, I do this because they need to learn how to handle pressure.” Which again, you’re thinking a five-year-old, a six-year-old. That’s scary to think.

But what happens then is they equate that feeling with math. I don’t know the psychology of how we can best help kids learn how to handle pressure situations, but I don’t want it linked with math. Our goal is to help them learn how to deal with pressure. Take it out of the math classroom. Find other ways of doing that. We need to separate it from math. Otherwise, we’re never going to get beyond the math anxiety that’s crippling so many of these potential rich mathematical thinkers.

Vicki Davis (09:22): A lot of it comes back to the fact that my mom was a teacher, and I remember hearing her tell my dad her education is not going to be over before it starts, because this was first grade for me. And we spent a whole lot of time after dinner counting apples and counting this and counting that and so much time.

Not everybody has the tutor like I had to help me understand, because if she hadn’t intervened, my whole life would have been different just because of timed tests. And I was good in school. I was valedictorian in my high school class. I was first in my class at Georgia Tech. And when I tell people that math facts were so hard for me, I’ve had people roll their eyes at me. I’ve had people make fun of me as an adult.

Do they know their math facts? Yes, they need to know them — but not do they need to do X number of problems at X amount of time.

I’m glad that you’re talking openly about this, and I don’t want anybody to think that we are advocating for sorriness or not knowing math. We want them to know math. We want them to have excellence. But this is a better way to excellence than having people have their whole life changed.

Vicki Davis (10:25): Gina, do you have like a favorite game that’s your go-to when you kind of start those math facts?

Gina Kling (10:31): I do, absolutely. And you know what? As soon as we started talking about it, I thought, boy, I wish I grabbed a deck of cards, because it’s my favorite game. I’m gonna go out on a limb and think it’s probably Jenny’s favorite game too. It’s the game that kind of brought us together as writing partners. And it’s called Salute.

Where, if the three of us were playing — I was the dealer. I would give you each a card that you would put up on your foreheads, but you wouldn’t be allowed to look at. So you would each be holding up a card. I would look at your cards. And I would tell you what the sum of those two cards are. And then you would — so Vicki, you would look at Jenny. So let’s say I said the sum was 16. And you look at Jenny and you see a nine. You can figure out what your missing addend is. The same time, Jenny’s looking at you and she’s seeing a seven on your forehead and figuring out that she has a nine. And then we just rotate roles.

It’s one of my favorite games because it is so incredibly engaging. Family math nights and parents and kids together are getting engaged. But I also love it because as much as we want math to be fun, it’s got to be meaningful. It’s got to have mathematical meat to it. And that particular game, they’re using addition, they’re using subtraction. We can actually adapt it when they get a little older to multiplication and division. They all have a different role in the game that they all depend on each other to be able to make the game work.

So it’s just a mathematically rich game. Imagine kids playing that for 15 minutes — all the facts they’re practicing, probably the same number of facts as they would on a worksheet, but they’re so much more engaged. And that engagement is going to make that understanding last. That’s a fun one.

Vicki Davis (11:58): One of the biggest obstacles I have in computer science is if I ever hear a parent say, “I was never good at computer.” And one of the things I see in math in particular, the parents will say, “Oh, I was never good at math” too. And they try to pigeonhole their child, create that block. How do you coach teachers to be respectful and honoring of the parents — because we work with parents, not against parents — to help kids have an open mind that, hey, I can be good at math? Because our future as a country is grounded in, can we really get this math thing turned around. It’s important.

Gina Kling (12:34): We have a whole chapter in our book. Our last chapter is about communicating, like, with the broader community, primarily families, and the experiences that we provide not only for children in our schools but for families, in terms of rethinking what it means to be good at math — because that’s really where the source of the problem is. You know, the notion that they had of what it meant to be good at math, being fast, being good at memorizing, really has very little to anything to do with being good at it. Like, what we value is problem solving, perseverance.

And so not only sharing those messages in our schools, both with how we teach kids but also how we assess kids, that we have that coherence — that, yeah, I value your thinking, I value the fact that you’re sticking with this problem and working really hard — but then providing environments for parents to explore that. Something very engaging around a family math night.

We send home bookmarks with some of our games and game baggies that just give guidance to parents on how to play math games with their kids, how to ask questions — like just asking their children as they play, “How did you figure it out? Can you think of another way you could figure that out?” Because they don’t know, because they probably never had experiences playing math games as kids. We need to help coach our parents to not only understand what it really means to do mathematics effectively and how they can best help their children with that. It really is changing the narrative around all of that.

Vicki Davis (13:54): I love that. Jenny, did you want to add anything?

Jennifer Bay-Williams (13:56): We do want to help parents. Parents want to help their child. And so we’re going to help them help their child by pointing out that math is no more inherited than reading or social studies. It’s acquired through hard work and good experiences. And if they feel not good at math, then they’ll be excited that we’re trying to remove some of the things in our ways of teaching that have caused those bad feelings, like timed tests — and replace them with things that lead to that confidence and competence, like learning about strategies so that you can figure the problem out. You don’t have to rely on your memory.

That’s what we’re trying to do, is to really bolster students’ confidence and competence early on, because they carry that forward. And so the way the parents can help is they can be open that they didn’t have a good math experience, but they have to help the student recognize that that was through their own experiences and not some sort of genetic flaw.

Vicki Davis (14:49): Exactly. Saying, I think you have a great teacher. I would love it if you would have a great experience so you can help me with math. Spin it around, because we want our children to be excellent. Oh, this has been such a delightful conversation.

Jennifer Bay-Williams (15:04): To make your life easier playing those games — there is a companion website where the games are downloadable. Half of the games are downloadable. It’s a free website for anyone. The Kentucky Center for Mathematics developed this website during COVID and just as a service to ASCD. That’s why it’s located on the Kentucky Center for Mathematics website.

But if you just Google the title of the book, Math Fact Fluency Companion Website, and you look for the picture of the purple book, you’ll end up on that website. Half the games are there. They’re in English and in Spanish. There are student recording pages. Some of the assessment tools are there as well. If you want to play Subtraction Stacks, you don’t have to make that game board, or Trios. It’s downloadable on the website.

Vicki Davis (15:43): Dr. Gina Kling and Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams, thank you for having this.

Vicki Davis (15:49): Thanks for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.