Summer Math Games for Reluctant Math Boy

My rising 5th grader is a smart kid. He's creative, inventive, and has a mind like a steel trap. He can remember so many cool facts and figures. Every week he brings home STACKS and STACKS of books from the library (mostly non fiction) and reads them all before we go back. He's constantly wowing me with his factoids and interesting trivia. I don't know how he holds it all in that handsome head of his. He loves computers and has learned to do some coding. Like his father, he has a mechanical brain and can figure out how things work and how to fix them fairly quickly.

So, it's all the more frustrating to me that he still struggles with his math facts. He can remember how many people live in China and what their top exports are, but he can't remember 9x4? Really? Even after I've taught him aaaaaallllll of the "nine tricks"? WHY? His shaky grasp of the math facts was really getting in the way as we headed into long division, fractions and the like. He was starting to hate math. It became a struggle. "NO!" I screamed in my head. "I refuse to have another reluctant math student. THIS will not DO!"

I remembered reading an article about this topic, reminding educators that the main reason kids resist math in upper elementary school is that they don't have a firm grasp on basic facts, and the problems that seem so easy and quick for us adults, are actually so tedious and laborious for kids who just can't figure out what 7 x 6 is. Yeah. That made a lot of sense to me. So I set out to fix that this summer: 

Summer Math Plan for Cranky Factoid Boy:
 *Play games!
*Review/Drill
*Play more Games!
*Review and Drill some more
*Learn multiplication fact songs.

 And I have to say, it's working. We haven't even touched his text book this summer. I did a lot of research and just put together a binder full of math games that we play every other day. In between those days I give him a math drill sheet that I grabbed for free from Learn Math Fast.  And every day or so, we practiced a new song from Times to Remember.  We all really like the songs and find ourselves singing them randomly around the house.  4.x8 is one of our favorites: "Tooty-Hoo!"

I think his favorite game was Kaboom!  I used to play this game with my kids when they were younger to help them with their  sight words.  But we called it "unicorn" because that's what my girls were into at the time.  You can play Kaboom to learn pretty much anything and even my 6yo liked it and learned a lot of her facts along the way.

Was it worth it to take our whole summer term (9 weeks!) away from the texts book and focus on just memorizing facts?   yeah, I think so.  I'm sure hoping that it will eliminate the daily math struggle when we pick up his text book and keep moving forward with it.