Building Fact Fluency:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
General Information
Grade levels have not been assigned to the Building Fact Fluency toolkits because they are intended to be used in any classroom or small group focusing on building fact fluency. Each toolkit holds enough content for multiple years of instruction.
The Addition & Subtraction toolkit can be used in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 classrooms or for older students who need additional support. There are multiyear pacing guides on the Companion Website that highlight different ways teachers might use the content across years without task repetition. The toolkit can also be used in intervention or other academic support, summer school, after school, or home school.
The Multiplication & Division toolkit aligns with the major work of the grade in grades 3 and 4, and is also appropriate for students in grade 5 and up if they have not yet had sufficient opportunities to make sense of the operations and develop fluency with most number combinations. The tasks are broken into Set A and Set B for ease of use across grades 3 and 4, and optional routines are included to provide resources for further practice without repetition in other settings or later years.
Yes. Both Building Fact Fluency kits are aligned to the Common Core State Standards as well as standards for several states. Visit the “Implementation” section of each toolkit’s Companion Website for a copy of available standards correlations.
Yes. Both the Addition & Subtraction and the Multiplication & Division Companion Websites include the specific toolkit’s Research Base Overview under the “Implementation” section of the site.
The materials in Building Fact Fluency: A Toolkit for Addition & Subtraction were made to accommodate whole-group instruction for up to 26 students per class. For classes with more than 26 students, we offer an additional pack of 5 decks of cards as a separate purchase, which will provide enough physical cards for up to 36 students.
Building Fact Fluency: A Toolkit for Multiplication & Division contains enough materials to accommodate 32 students. For classes larger than 32 students, additional dice and counters would be needed for gameplay.
For both toolkits, teachers can print as many copies of student-facing tasks as needed from the Companion Website.
Yes. Student-facing tasks included in Building Fact Fluency are available on the Companion Website in both English and Spanish. In addition, Spanish translations of the Parent/Caregiver Letter are on the Companion Website for teachers to send home to families.
When there are staffing changes, the kit can be transferred from one teacher to another. Here are a few recommendations to make this more manageable.
- Upon receiving their new toolkit, ask teachers to add a label to the inside lid of the box that includes their e-mail and password (either the access code associated with the lid or a unique, customized password). This will make it easier for the next teacher using the kit to log into the account and update the e-mail and password with their own information. Please note, for the teacher’s cyber security, the password should be used only for their Building Fact Fluency toolkit.
- To update the account, the new user would just need to log in to the Building Fact Fluency Companion Website, go to the “My Account” page, and select the “Edit” tab. From there they will need to supply the prior user’s password and change the e-mail address. If they would like to reset the password as well as the e-mail address, they can do that at the same time.
- Once this new teacher has updated the account, they should follow the same process of labeling their user e-mail and password on the inside lid so that the next teacher using the kit can follow the same account update process in following years.
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In addition, if a school or district creates an Excel or Google spreadsheet to track access codes, user e-mails, and password information, the new teacher should make sure that this document is updated with their updated e-mail and password information. This will make it easier for our Building Fact Fluency team to find your account if you need assistance accessing the website or updating accounts.
If assistance is required, please e-mail buildingfactfluency@stenhouse.com.
No. An Addition & Subtraction toolkit and a Multiplication & Division toolkit can both be accessed through the same account. To add a toolkit to an existing account, log in to the Companion Website and select “My account” from the upper right corner. This page will display the current toolkit you have access to on your account and provide an option to add another. Once both kits are set up on your account, you will have the option to access either toolkit each time you log into the site.
You do not need to ask permission to share the digital components of Building Fact Fluency with your class in a private virtual meeting such as Google Meet, Zoom, etc., or when using protected virtual platforms like Google Classroom, Seesaw, Padlet, Flipgrid, etc. We do ask that you help protect the authors’ intellectual property and years of work by keeping the materials within those protected sites. Please refrain from posting the materials on the public internet or sharing materials with colleagues who are not registered users.
The Facilitator’s Guide is only available in print and it is not currently available for separate purchase. The only way to access a new Facilitator’s Guide is by purchasing a new toolkit.
Implementation
Yes. The Building Fact Fluency toolkits are coherent, supplemental, curricular resources that are tightly focused on developing number sense and fluency and align well to the major number and operations work of elementary school.
Just like any other curriculum, each classroom needs its own Building Fact Fluency toolkit. This way, each teacher will have a Facilitator’s Guide and enough materials for every student.
Professional learning, including implementation support, is built into the Building Fact Fluency toolkits. Under the “Implementation” tab on the Companion Website, there are two getting started videos recorded by authors Graham Fletcher and Tracy Johnston Zager: the first video provides planning and pacing recommendations while the other dives deeper into the Lesson String routines and assessment. These two videos along with the Facilitator’s Guide and the Companion Website are all teachers will need to get started with Building Fact Fluency.
Each Building Fact Fluency toolkit includes a unique access code intended for creating one user account. However, the same account (e-mail and password) can be shared with another educator allowing for two simultaneous logins within the same classroom. For example, a teacher might be projecting images and facilitating a discussion with the large group, while the other educator works with a small group on a tablet or laptop.
There are multiple ways to use Building Fact Fluency effectively across years without repetition.
For Addition & Subtraction, the Companion Website provides multiple suggested multiyear sequences: Possible Multi-Year Pacing Guides for Building Fact Fluency: A Toolkit for Addition & Subtraction. These sequences can be adopted as is, or they can help launch conversations among teams of teachers about tailoring or creating a pacing guide for your setting.
The multiplication and division toolkit has been separated into Set A and Set B so teachers can use Set A (generally in grade 3) and Set B (generally in grade 4) without repeating tasks. There are further suggestions for three-year pacing in the Facilitator’s Guide.
The lessons in Building Fact Fluency are designed to take an average of 15 minutes per day. Some tasks are warm-up length, and other tasks form the main portion of a problem-based lesson. Games and practice problems can be used flexibly. You can find multiple weekly schedule options in the Facilitator’s Guides.
The Building Fact Fluency materials can be used in any of these settings. The Companion Website contains an implementation guide for remote instruction and webinars that discuss pacing and adaptations for both remote and summer school settings. The Facilitator’s Guide contains multiple suggested schedules for different models, and the materials are designed for flexible use cases.
Building Fact Fluency is a highly efficient resource for support or intervention because students build number sense, conceptual understanding of operations, and fact fluency at the same time. It can be used as a stand-alone resource in support settings. Perhaps most ideally, it can also be used in both the general education and support setting, simultaneously. Each Lesson String contains ample activities so that the general education teacher might choose some of the routines and tasks and the specialized teacher can choose other, complementary, coherent routines and tasks. Taught this way, students can receive additional, related, supporting instruction and practice without repetition. See the Addition & Subtraction Facilitator’s Guide pp. 46-47 and Multiplication & Division Facilitator’s Guide pp. 105-106 for more information about how to use the toolkits outside of the general classroom setting.
The Building Fact Fluency approach to assessment disrupts typical fact fluency assessment procedures such as timed tests and replaces them with more meaningful and less anxiety-provoking methods that emphasize listening carefully to students’ thinking. Within Building Fact Fluency, you’ll find the tools and resources needed to support assessment through observations, interviews, looking at student work, journal prompts, and student self-assessment. The Facilitator’s Guides describe these assessment approaches in detail, while the Companion Website includes videos showing what these methods can look like in action.
The goal of Building Fact Fluency is for students to know and be able to use their facts when needed, in the midst of real problem solving. Rather than testing facts in isolation—which would not be an authentic measure of this goal—Building Fact Fluency teachers use the formative assessment techniques supported within the toolkit in concert with existing curricular, school, or district summative assessment measures to document students’ growth. Students will have plenty of opportunities to show and apply what they’ve learned in Building Fact Fluency on these more authentic measures, and teachers will be able to gather all the information they need through assessment that’s tightly interwoven with instruction.
There is a short letter to families and caregivers on the Companion Website for each toolkit that explains the overall approach to fluency, and how they can help and support their child in learning their number combinations at home. The letter is available in English and in Spanish.
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS?
For permission and copyright questions, please contact our Permissions Department:
E-mail: permissions@stenhouse.com
For all other inquiries, please contact Customer Experience:
E-mail: buildingfactfluency@stenhouse.com
Phone: 800-988-9812
To connect and share questions, comments, and ideas with other educators interested in fact fluency, you can also join the Building Fact Fluency Facebook Community at: