Back in the early days, I taught my child using the simple dots or slashes, as a means to promote fluency in addition. In the early grades, the use of dots was discourage by the school, and she was force to go stealth, by using another part of the sheet that had empty space on, instead of putting the dots right under the numbers. Than the dots were erase because she did not want to yell at by the teacher. As my child puts it, and I believe her because at home, the simple dots or slash system was always used and she arrived at the correct answers each and every time. As with other effective strategies, as soon as the student has automatic recall for the math facts, the strategy is dropped, and only employed if the student has forgotten how to add 9 + 7, or is not 100 percent sure that 9 + 7 = 16.

At the end of the video, .Math Mammoth is presented, and was and still is one of my favourites for remediation of the lower math facts, and makes quick work of getting rid of the fuzzy math strategies taught in the present primary math curriculum.