With the recent delivery of several workshops highlighting new and fun approaches to practicing math facts and developing mental math skills, students at St James school are reaping the benefits. At the beginning of every math period, students are encouraged to use playing cards or dice to practice addition and multiplication skills independently and to test each other in fun math challenges. Primary and junior students are also learning the benefits of strategies such as decomposing or friendly numbers to add difficult numbers without the use of paper, pencils or calculators. Student engagement is obvious and real learning is happening!