How Do You Motivate Students to Learn Their Math Facts?

I am trying something new this year to help motivate students to learn their math facts.  I heard about doing Math Wars from another math coach.  Each class will give themselves a name for a team.  The team could even be alliterated for more fun.  For example, Mr. Bowers Brains or Ms. Elwick’s Elephants.  Having the students take ownership in what they name themselves promotes more motivation to work towards the goal of learning their facts.

Classes challenge other classes to beat them on their fact races.  Grade levels can challenge other grade levels too.  For the first Math War at my school, I have decided to just have classes compete with other classes in the same grade.  To determine the winner, I am calculating the total amount of items that are correct and taking a class average.  This way all of the students are working towards doing better, and there are no tears or frustrations if all of them are not answered.  Students will be answering all of the facts in the race, and I will give them two seconds per problem.  If there are 60 problems, then students will have 2 minutes to answer all of their problems  For the next war classes may compete outside their grade level; 4th graders may challenge 5th graders, for example.  One of the teachers at my school suggested putting up schedules like when football games are played.  So working with this suggestion, I have placed posters on the walls to add to the anticipation of triumphing over another team.  This has added to student motivation since I hear students saying that “we are gonna beat Ms.____’s class”.

For trophies I tried to think of something that would reflect the idea of math and that I could spray paint gold.  After brainstorming with several colleagues, someone suggested an abacus.  So now I have the GOLDEN ABACUS (angels singing in the background).   The golden abacus will be traveling to the winning classes and will go to follow the next champion.  I bought several abacuses so that each winning class could have an abacus for each WAR.