Just as being a fluent reader frees up the brain to focus on deeper comprehension of the text, math fact fluency frees up the brain to focus on higher-level math concepts.  With the mastery of math facts comes less time-solving problems, less fatigue, and frustration, less math anxiety.

This year one of my SGOs (Student Growth Objectives) is to help students develop automaticity of their multiplication and division math facts.  By the end of the year, students will be able to answer math facts 1-12 within 3 seconds per fact, with a high degree of accuracy.  So, if there are 30 math facts,  students should be able to complete all of them within 90 seconds.  This is how I plan to track their growth:

My first note in Math for each student is a pic note of their first timed basic facts test.  In the Comments text field, I entered the date of the test, the student’s time, and the accuracy percentage.  Since this text gets saved as a Speed Note, it was easy to use the Speed Note for the next student; I just needed to quickly adjust the time and percentage.

And because Chronicle allows for multiple notes in each text field (and allows for multiple pics), it will be easy to insert the date/time/percentage of the next timed facts test in the text field below (under September 12…).  I can then include the corresponding picture.  I plan to do this once a month. So if you can imagine, you would see a date/time/percentage for the month of September, October, November, and so on.  Along with, each month will be the pic of the administered test.  This makes it easy to track and share progress. Tapping on the thumbnail on the bottom of the screen, I can easily pull up and view the assessment (see below).  And what’s also nice is that once I have multiple pics, I can just swipe from one to the next.

It’s great to be able to quickly pull up the assessment to determine the child’s needs.  With this particular student, it’s apparent that work needs to be done with the 12 times table.

But what may be the greatest thing for me is that feeling of being able to recycle those stacks of paper, as they’ve now been Chronicled!  🙂