Resources for Families

Five Things Families Can Do to Help Their Child Advance in Mathematics

1. Complete Today's Box on Fluency by Heart

Fluency by HeartThese beautiful flash cards use spaced repetition to teach arithmetic facts. Achieve fluency with just five minutes of practice per day!

Fluency by Heart is a digital math practice program for students in Grades K-8 that uses spaced repetition and personalized digital flashcards to help students build automaticity with basic math facts and skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It is designed to go beyond rote memorization, aiming for conceptual understanding and efficient, accurate calculation, not just speed. The practice adjusts to a student's performance, with students seeing cards they are more likely to forget more frequently. Students should log on to their Amplify account for at least 10 minutes every day and practice the selected facts until they are committed to memory.

2. Fluency Practice

Each student in Grade 2-6 has been mapped onto both the additive and multiplicative continuums shown below. Parents can obtain this information from their child's mathematics teacher and then use the links below to identify activities to do with their child that are tailored to their student's "next step" in the continuums.

Additive Continuum

Skills

*Indicates Required Automaticities

Multiplicative Continuum

Skills

*Indicates Required Automaticities

3. Play Math Games

Pico Fermi Bagel

Pico Fermi Bagel is a math game where one person writes down a 3 or 4 digit number and the guessers try and figure it out based on process of elimination and strategy. If you have ever played the board game Mastermind, it is similar to that. This game can be played with pencil and paper or a white board and dry erase markers.

Nerdle

Nerdle - the daily numbers gameDaily number challenge at nerdlegame.com

Nerdle is the mathematics equivalent to Wordle. Guess the Nerdle in six tries. After each guess, the color of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the solution. Students can play Nerdle to build procedural fluency, logical reasoning, and flexible thinking. There are variations that can be used to increase accessibility or increase challenge.

24 Game

The "24 game" is a mental math game where players use four numbers, each exactly once, with the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to arrive at the number 24. Students can play this game to practice mental math skills and develop procedural fluency. Family members and students can compete to see how many ways they can "make 24."

4. Spend Time in Polypad - The Mathematical Playground

Polypad – The Mathematical PlaygroundUnleash your creativity with the world’s best virtual manipulatives!

Amplify Polypad is an online “digital math playground” with interactive virtual manipulatives for students in Grades K-12 to explore mathematical concepts. It provides a customizable canvas with tools for shapes, graphs, music, and more, allowing for creativity and problem-solving. Students can use Polypad to play with mathematics and develop deeper understanding about mathematical relationships.

5. Make the Number of the Day

Number of the Day

In Number of the Day, a family member presents a number to students using the specifications to the left. The student then finds as many ways as they can to make the number.

Office of Mathamatics Fluency Nights

Mathematics Coaches and Parent Liaisons work collaboratively to provide

School-Based Family Outreach in Mathematics

Mathematics Coaches and Parent Liaisons work collaboratively to provide

Mathematics Coach Roberts at Belmont Runyon set up a math station at the school entrance for parents and students on December 4, 2025 for Parent Conference Night!

Mathematics Coach Esteves at Ironbound Academy helped parents get their students logged on to Fluency by Heart and explained the process of spaced repetition.