We have designed the Strategy Mats to provide a tool for students when working on developing fluency with number facts. From our observations students need visual aide-memoires: reminders of what they have been learning and prompts to use the strategies learnt.

This strategy mat is designed to extend fluency with basic number facts to fluency with two digit additions and beyond. The mat can be used as a teaching tool as well as an aide-memoire for the students. The mat provides five working spaces, each of which encourages different types of thinking and/or representations of thinking. The purpose of the spaces is to ensure that students think flexibly and critically about which strategy to use for a particular set of numbers.

We find that some students have a rigid and fixed mindset about mental computation and always choose the same strategy even though it may not be efficient or, in some cases, reliable. This is particularly so for those students who have over-learnt and over-practiced traditional digit-based algorithms.

This addition mat supports the teaching of Year 2: ACMNA030 and Year 3: ACMNA055.

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