Starting with a Strategic Fact: What is it?

  This strategy can be used for both multiplication and division efficiently. Strategic, or familiar facts, that students have will also vary with each individual.

Overview

Using this multiplication and division strategy, students use a known fact that is closely related to the unknown fact to help them solve the equation. For instance, the student who forgets the answer to 6 x 7 uses a known fact such as 5 x 7, and then adds on one more group of 7. Or when solving 8 x 12, students may also use a known fact, such as 8x10 to help solve the question. At times, this strategy may mimic using partial products by place value, however all students will have different familiar facts and will utilize such facts as they find helpful.

This strategic (familiar or known) fact that students choose are based on their own personal confidence and choice.

Common Strategic Facts

Supporting Students Using Strategic Facts

This strategy builds on students’ prior knowledge to determine unknown facts. Students develop efficient strategies for fact retrieval when being encouraged to use reasoning skills and look for patterns and relationships between numbers. A student learns certain number facts before others, and they can use such known facts to derive answers for unknown facts. The most commonly known facts are 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x and their doubles. So, if a student knows their 2x facts and they get a question such as 4x6=? they can think… 2x6=12 so 4x6=24 since 4 is the double of 2.

Playing math games that encourage students to build fact fluency will benefit students. The more facts that students can automatically recall or have become known facts, the more likely students are to use such facts to arrive at unknown answers. 

Educators are also encouraged to point out relationships among numbers to allow students to notice patterns in multiplication facts.

Where to Next?

Once students are making use of strategic and familiar facts, they can be encouraged to work with multi-digit numbers and using familiar facts to support. Shifting toward the use of partial products and/or partial quotients may also be encouraged.

Looking to learn more? Check out the recorded session!