Help Your Child Learn Times Tables

Why Am I Writing This Post?

Starting High School is an exciting time and often it involves a lot of stress for your children. There is so much change happening all at once. As a teacher, I often experience that students still do not know their times table in Year 9. In primary and intermediate schools Mathematics is often seen as a computational subject and knowing your times table (and knowing it fast) is often what describes someone who is good at Mathematics. Students who do not know their times table often feel demotivated and disengaged in the Mathematics classroom. They simply do not see themselves as good in Mathematics, especially when other students around them know their times tables so much better and faster.

In this blog post I aim to support parents with a strategy on how to support their children with learning their times table.

Here is a 5 step method on how you as a parent can support your children with their times tables:

Step 1: Skip Count First

Before diving straight into memorizing the times table, it is important for the learner to understand patterns. We want students to first understand the multiples of a number by recognizing the patterns. This will further support the idea that multiplication is repeated addition later on (in Step 5) and will therefore support the student in making connections between multiplication and addition.
Skip counting is FUN! We want to engage our students as early as we can and a lot of children find skip counting entertaining while potentially still challenging. This lays a strong foundation for students since they already know the answers to the times table and we now have to connect their knowledge to the factors as well.

Step 2: Learn One Table at a Time

Once your child is comfortable with skip counting it is time to learn one times table at a time. Start with the 1 times table. The learner should recognize the pattern fairly quickly and giving our students success right from the beginning is very important. We want our children to experience positive feelings the first time they are learning the times table.

Start with the 1 times table, then move to the 2 times table, then the 3 times table, and so on.
Do not rush ahead. Mastery comes from confidence, not speed.

The key to success is daily practice. Just 10 minutes a day is enough.

This can easily happen when you are:

• In the car on your way to school

• Sitting on the couch in the morning

• At breakfast with tea and a nice hot chocolate

Make sure you only move to the next times table once your child is confident

Step 3: Help Memorize Through Repetition

How do you remember a phone number when you want to call them?
Do you repeat it aloud or in your mind until you need to type it?

It is important to Quiz the learner on a regular basis. Start with going through the times table in order: 1 times 2, 2 times 2, 3 times 2 and so on. This will support the students learning, because they already know the answers from skip counting. In this step the students are connecting the factors (1 times 3) and the product (=3). Once the learner is able to go through one of the specific times tables, quiz them with questions in different orders. This step is critical, because if the learner has mastered their times table, they will be able to answer questions in any order. If the student is struggling at this stage, keep repeating questions.

If your child forgot one of the times tables (for example 3 times 4 equals 12), make sure you ask them to repeat it 5 times aloud. While the students usually do not want to do so, it is critical that you follow through. Hearing our own voices repeat the times table supports our learning through repetition. Now ask a couple of different questions and then go back to the incorrect one (3 times 4 is 12). Repeat as many times as needed.

Step 4: Practice Every Single Day

This step might sound easy to understand, yet it is the hardest of all. We are all busy and have good days and bad days. However, our job is to support our learner with making connections in their long term memory to be able to replicate all times tables in the future. This takes time and a lot of work. Keep it simple: 5 to 10 minutes a day is more than enough. Try not to skip any days. You will recognize how much that have set them back if you missed one.

Step 5: Ensure Understanding, Not Just Memorization

Once your child knows the times table by heart, our job is not done yet! It is important to make sure they understand what multiplication actually means. It is not simply a magic number that we randomly had to memorize. Go back to the basics of skip counting and show them that 4 times 5 is actually 5+5+5+5. That is why 4 times 5 is 20.

This is where you can also search a YouTube video or other resources like visual aids to show students groupings and multiplication in action. Students who understand the times table will be able to understand this final step much more easily.