Should I mix the math facts to bring them back after a break?

No. Do not mix the pile. Mixed cards measure rust. They do not remove it. One fact, untimed, from a picture they can show. After a break, a shuffled deck looks like review. It is a test of everything that thinned at once.

Mixing looks like review

A break ends and the facts feel gone. The honest urge is to shuffle: all the addition, a little subtraction, whatever is in the tin, so they “come back.” Mixing feels thorough. It feels like you did not pick favorites. It also asks for twenty recoveries in a row, with no picture under any of them.

After a holiday or a long weekend, mixing also feels like fairness: you did not skip the hard ones. Fairness here is the wrong virtue. The hard ones come back the same way the easy ones do — as a picture, then a hold — not as a random sample.

That is a placement quiz, not a return. They guess. They feel slow. The next card is worse because the last one already proved they had forgotten. You have measured the rust. You have not moved it.

Keep the book you already use as the spine. The cards, if you use them, are for one hole beside that book. They are not a second program that starts the year by sampling every fact.

One fact from a picture

Put the picture back first. Eight is three and five, shown with objects or a small sketch, not only said after you. If they cannot show it, stay with the picture. Mixing will not teach a relationship that was never held.

If they can show it and still stall on the bare fact, that is the one to hold. Untimed. Stay until they can say it without your sentence. Then one neighbor — the double, the making-ten partner, the family — not a random jump into the rest of the tin.

When that one is held, stop. Tomorrow you can ask it once, cold. If it is still there, you earned the next thin one. If it is gone, yesterday’s pile was still too wide.

Then stop

After a break, stopping feels like you did not do enough. Mixing is how that feeling spends the sitting. The repair is a small hold, then the lesson they are actually in.

A mixed stack will still be there next week. It does not get kinder because you ran it on the first day back.

The free hold

Flash Cards are free for that one-fact hold: no timer, until it is known, then back to the lesson. They are not a shuffled year. They are not a second spine.

Leave the mixed tin shut. After a break, bring back what they can see, then one neighbor, then stop.