How One Teacher Rebuilt Fact Fluency Across Two Districts

I came to teaching as a second career. After years working in accounting, I decided I wanted my work to have more purpose, and I knew I'd find it in a classroom. In 2019, I landed a 5th grade math position and quickly learned that teaching was the hardest job I'd ever done — and also the most fulfilling.

It didn't take long to notice a problem. Many of my students lacked basic math fact fluency. And in 5th grade, where so much of the math depends on multiplication, that gap shows up everywhere.

The Challenge: A District Focused on Concepts, Not Practice

My district was heavily focused on conceptual math, and traditional fluency drills were discouraged. I understood the reasoning, but I also knew my students needed more fact practice than they were getting. So I started looking through the programs available on our district dashboard, and I came across XtraMath.

I'd never used it. None of my teammates were using it. But it was approved, so I started exploring.

What immediately appealed to me was how simple it was. It wasn't overly gamified, it didn't eat up a big chunk of instructional time, and students could get meaningful practice in just a few minutes a day. Since it was already approved on our dashboard, I finally had a way to give my students the fact practice I believed they needed.

Finding a Routine That Stuck

We started using XtraMath consistently. I printed certificates, celebrated progress, and made a big deal out of every success. Then COVID shut everything down. We went fully remote, and I never got to see the complete picture of that first year. Still, I knew my students were building fluency, and I felt confident they left my class knowing more facts than when they'd arrived.

The following year brought a different set of challenges. Half my students were learning remotely, and half were sitting in front of me, and we were all figuring out how to use technology in ways we never had before. When I went back to XtraMath, I found out my district was no longer paying for it — so I paid for it myself. It was affordable, and I believed in what I'd already seen.

The kids loved racing the teacher, and I loved watching their progress. That was also my first year giving STAAR as a classroom teacher, and considering everything my students had been through, they performed well. I have no doubt that stronger fact fluency, supported by XtraMath, played a role in that.

A Mandate That Made Me Think Harder About Fluency

Around that time, our district brought in a consultant who required every 4th- and 5th-grade student to build a multiplication chart from scratch daily in under five minutes. I followed the requirement, but it pushed me to think more deeply about what fluency actually looks like.

Here's what I noticed: the students who could build the chart quickly generally didn't need it as a resource in the first place. The students who needed it most usually couldn't finish it accurately because they didn't know their facts yet. I started to question whether building a multiplication chart every day was really building fluency — or just reinforcing skip counting and repeated addition.

I kept following the mandate. But I supplemented it with XtraMath.

A New District, a Steeper Climb

In 2023, I changed districts and moved to 4th grade. I had two classes of 22 students — 44 kids total — and 23 of them had failed the previous year's math STAAR. My new campus was rated a D and had been an F the year before. We knew we had significant academic ground to make up.

My new district happened to hire the same consultant, so once again we were building daily multiplication charts. I complied, working alongside my students under the document camera and teaching them efficient ways to build the chart — starting with the facts they already knew and using those to fill in the harder ones, like the 6s, 7s, and 8s.

But I also brought back XtraMath. Again, I paid for it myself, because it was affordable and because I knew it worked.

What I Noticed

My students thrived with XtraMath. They were genuinely excited to tell me when they'd mastered a new set of facts — that kind of pride is hard to fake, and it's exactly what I want to see from a 4th grader working on something as unglamorous as multiplication facts.

By the end of the year, several students had moved up STAAR performance levels, including some who moved up two levels. Our campus improved from a D rating to a B that year.

That kind of growth made me think even more deeply about fact fluency — what works, what doesn't, and what we may have gotten wrong in math education.

The Idea That Ties It All Together

My daughters have both taught in the primary grades, and I'd often tell them we needed to treat math facts more like we treat sight words in reading. We expect children to recognize common words automatically, because we know automaticity supports fluent reading. Somewhere along the way, though, memorizing math facts became almost taboo.

That thinking is where I landed on the phrase that now shapes a lot of my work: math facts are the sight words of numeracy.

I don't believe memorization and conceptual understanding have to compete with each other. Students absolutely need to understand what multiplication means, see patterns, build models, and develop number sense. But they also need to know that 7 × 8 = 56 without rebuilding the answer every single time. Automaticity frees up working memory for the harder math we're asking them to do.

I decided I wanted to share that message with other teachers, and I was accepted to present at CAMT, the Conference for the Advancement of Mathematics Teaching. My session focused on how fact fluency builds number flexibility, and I challenged teachers to think about how we bring short, intentional fact practice back into classrooms — even when instructional time is tight.

One strategy I strongly advocate is choral response. Students see the number sentence, hear it, and say the whole thing aloud: "Seven times eight equals fifty-six." I don't want students blurting out an isolated answer. I want the fact connected to the full mathematical relationship. Transition times and a few focused minutes a day are enough to make that kind of practice happen.

Why XtraMath Fits Perfectly

That's also why XtraMath continues to fit so well with my philosophy. It gives students exactly what they need without taking over the lesson. It's simple, focused, and efficient. Combined with strategies like daily choral response, it can help students make real gains in fluency.

For me, fact fluency isn't the end goal of mathematics — it's the foundation that lets students reach bigger goals. When students no longer have to spend so much mental energy on basic facts, they can put that cognitive space toward reasoning, problem-solving, and the more complex math ahead of them.

That's what I've seen in my classrooms, across two districts and very different groups of students. And it's why I keep advocating for both fact fluency — and XtraMath.

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Vicky Waterhouse
5th Grade Math
Teacher Centennial Elementary,
Humble ISD, TX.

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