Memorizing Math Facts

I don't know which has been the biggest thorn in my side, figuring out narrations or trying to find an effective way to teach Camille her math facts that actually absorbs in. Flashcards haven't been working, worksheets haven't really helped and take forever, games do help but they take a lot of time. I don't want to spend 30 minutes a day doing math facts, nothing kills the enthusiasm faster so only focusing on math facts isn't a solution for us.

Manipulatives slow things down here too and I can't say Camille really gets much from them. We did use popsicle sticks in 1st grade which helped but if I turned my back from her she would organize the sticks by color or make some sort of pattern with the sticks rather than use them for addition and subtraction. Skip counting is better for us now that we're using Intelli-Tunes Skip Counting songs.

We read children's math literature such as Ben Franklin and the Magic Squares, Sea Sums- here's a list of more titles with the concepts they cover. You can also view it as a HTML page here. It is better to download the pdf file and view it that way, I have this chart in my teacher's book. There are many children's math literature lists on the web, I like this one because it is for K-6 and tells me exactly what grade level and concept the book covers so I'm not blindly checking out books.

Math games are very useful for us but it needs to be outside of our lesson time, done informally just for fun. Playing math games with a time limit negates the joy of playing in our house. Camille would play for hours so putting this in the middle of our lessons creates behavior problems, which I'm all for addressing behavior issues but I don't see the need to create any. That said we are having fun playing with the inflatable dice.

Another thing is there are different teaching approaches for math facts (addition).

1+2=3
2+1=3
3-2=1
3-1=2

or memorizing groups of numbers that make the equation
3, 2, 1
2, 2, 4
1, 1, 2
2, 4, 6

memorizing by math familes
1+1
1+2
1+3
1+4

2+1
2+2
2+3
2+4

and there are different approaches for memorizing by math families, see Michele's Math which teaches math families but in a specific order.

Drilling with flashcards or worksheets, playing with games, and real-life math (which we do when we can). All of these ways may work for a child but they don't work for every child. This is where a teacher's frustration comes in. We're going to try math fact copywork since copywork has been successful for us, plus with Camille being a visual learner- writing something down helps cement the ideas in her head. The copywork has the child copy math facts within the math families until they are mastered- how simple is that?

I'll post about how it goes, but I am grateful for such an easy, simple solution right now.