Yes, Connective Fluency is aligned with the Australian Curriculum. The incremental rehearsal slides and fact fluency booklets can be used flexibly to meet the needs of your students. The computation booklets include curriculum-aligned skills, except for the ‘Extension Booklets’ in Grades 4 to 6 which include some above-grade level skills.

Elegant design - The resources in Connective Fluency have gone through a subtractive design process to make implementation as simple as possible. For example, while other fluency programs have high ongoing printing demands, the need to print resources in Connective Fluency is kept to a minimum. Booklets are printed for the start of the year and that’s all students will need. Students don’t write in the fact fluency booklets, so they can be used year after year.

Human element - Connective Fluency resources are designed to support human interaction in the classroom. For example, while other fluency programs have students responding to pre-recorded content, in Connective Fluency, students learn by interacting with a teacher (in Whole-Class Incremental Rehearsal) or helping each other (in Paired Fluency Practice).

Instant corrective feedback - Paired Fluency Practice allows all students to practise with instant corrective feedback. In classrooms that rely on whole-class chanting for fluency practice, less confident students can get lost in the crowd. And if students are writing their responses, feedback often arrives too late to make a difference. In Paired Fluency Practice, if a student hesitates or makes an error, their partner instantly gives them the answer and an opportunity to successfully retrieve it from memory.

Manageable differentiation - Other fluency programs have either convoluted systems for differentiation or no differentiation at all. Connective Fluency is designed to provide opportunities for manageable differentiation. In Whole-Class Incremental Rehearsal, teachers can direct more ‘opportunities to respond’ to students who need more repetition. In Paired Fluency Practice, students can practise from different pages in the booklet. For Timed Computation Practice, teachers can provide a different booklet to students who need it. (The computation booklets in Grades 4 to 6 come in ‘Standard’ and ‘Extension’ versions.)

Connecting knowledge - Connective Fluency is designed around the idea that conceptual knowledge aids memorisation and that memorisation aids conceptual understanding. Other fluency programs aim for students to learn facts as disconnected bits of knowledge. In Connective Fluency, students make connections between strategies and fact memorisation through incremental rehearsal and the sequencing of facts is explicitly based around the strategies that students learn, not just the size of the numbers.

General Principles

• Retrieval Practice - Memory is strengthened when information is successfully retrieved from long-term memory.

• Frequent, then Spaced Practice - Learning is enhanced by practising frequently at first, then gradually increasing the intervals between practice opportunities.

• Blocked, then Interleaved Practice - Learning is enhanced by practice that is first focused on a specific skill, then problem sets that demand students to switch between different problem types.

Whole-Class Incremental Rehearsal

• Conceptual Knowledge & Memorisation - ‘Conceptual knowledge’ refers to connecting facts to other knowledge about numbers through the application of strategies, for example relating 6 + 2 to the number sequence. ‘Memorisation’ refers to automatically and accurately responding to a problem (‘6 + 2’) with the answer (‘8’). The development of conceptual knowledge and memorisation have a bi-directional relationship; they support each other. In Connective Fluency, resources support developing both in tandem.

• Incremental Rehearsal - Traditionally, this is an evidence-based flashcard technique for 1-1 intervention. A new fact is taught then practised multiple times, each time after practising a steadily increasing set of previously learned facts. In Connective Fluency, this procedure has been adapted for a whole-class context with 2 facts being introduced at a time and the set of known facts increasing to 6, rather than 9.

Paired Fluency Practice

• Corrective Feedback - Feedback is effective when it helps students identify errors and results in students successfully demonstrating the target behaviour. In Paired Fluency Practice, when students make an error, they get immediate feedback and have an immediate opportunity to be successful.

• Collaborative Learning - Humans are a social species and are motivated by learning with and from other humans. Paired Fluency Practice capitalises on classroom dynamics by making every student feel accountable to, and supported by, another human.

Timed Computation Practice

• Spaced and Interleaved Practice - Regular practice using a worksheet of mixed problems ensures students have opportunities for independently applying knowledge and skills.

• Timed Practice and Growth Mindset - Timed activities that occur on a regular basis have 2 benefits. First, they clarify that an important learning goal is to develop fluency, not just accuracy. Second, they allow students to track their progress over time, bringing a concrete sense of how effort leads to improvement.

Connective Fluency is designed to take up a portion of the time in a typical maths lesson spent on daily review. Paired Fluency Practice takes about 5 minutes of daily review time every day. Timed Computation Practice occurs once a week or fortnight and takes 5-10 minutes including time to mark in class and record scores.

Use a universal screening assessment that assesses fluency in basic maths skills, such as Acadience Math. Look for the percentage of students at or above benchmark in the Acadience Math ‘Computation Fluency’ benchmark assessment to improve over time.

The worksheets in the Computation Booklets include mixed problems that are aligned with curriculum expectations, including:

• Multi-digit addition and subtraction

• Multi-digit multiplication and division (from Grade 3)

• Addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers (from Grade 4)

• Applying operations to decimals (Grade 6)

The booklets are designed so that the skills progress with each term. The skills in each term reflect what is typically taught prior to or during that term. A specific breakdown of the skills included in the worksheets can be found on the second page of each booklet.

There are Extension Booklets for Computation in Grades 4 to 6. Use these if students are achieving above benchmark and if there is capacity to teach these students above-grade level skills.

Even after students progress from a set of facts in Paired Fluency Practice, they will continue to encounter those facts in Timed Computation Practice. Think of Paired Fluency Practice as the engine for deliberate practice of specific sets of facts and Timed Computation Practice as the engine for spaced and interleaved practice.

Connective Fluency is not a resource for initial instruction in mental strategies or algorithms; it is designed to supplement other curriculums that teach mental and written strategies. For example, the Victorian Lesson Plans’ ‘Additive thinking’ sequences in Foundation and Level 1 teach a comprehensive range of strategies for addition and subtraction within 20. Once these skills have been taught, students need regular ongoing practice in order to develop mastery and that’s where Connective Fluency comes in.