Last year on Math 4 All, Molly and I had the amazing opportunity to talk about math fluency with Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams! I absolutely LOVE her fluency books and Figuring Out Fluency (Amazon Affiliate Link) really helped me think more systematically about fluency. While I’ve come across many ideas for teaching fluency with lots of strategies, some the same, some very different. I resonated with the idea of a manageable number of strategies that could be used in K-8.
This idea of 7 Significant Strategies became the foundation for some additional thinking documents for teachers who were using one of the IM Math products. One of the challenges that the teachers I support were sharing is that they were not sure when or what strategies to focus on. The beginning lessons in IM encourage students to solve in ways that make sense to them. This allows the teacher to notice what students are doing and highlight thinking during the synthesis or consolidation of the lesson. As you move through the unit strategies were often suggested (IM 360 is a bit more obvious about the strategies which is a great improvement). As we were wanting to focus on fluency goals and manipulative use I created the following documents as suggestions for what strategies and manipulatives could be used.
4th Grade
I will be providing a more in-depth discussion of these ideas in videos on my channel.