How to Teach Your Kids the Times Tables... Without the Tears!

If children find maths boring, that’s on us! Maths is the language of the universe, it’s creative. It should be a discovery, an adventure, not just a bunch of rules to follow like robots. Making children sit at a desk drilling sums is denying them the opportunity to experience the magic.

Let children explore multiplication. Lay out rows of building blocks or toy soldiers and encourage them to look for patterns. See what techniques they discover to help them multiply quickly. Let them know that they’re allowed to have their own ideas, to find their own methods. That’s how the maths of the real world works.

Once they start to get comfortable with the idea of multiplication, get it up on its feet, turn it into a game, make it feel like play.

• Incorporate the times tables into a treasure hunt.
• Create a fun obstacle course where the number of jumping jacks or ball bounces required at each station is the answer to a multiplication. You’ll get the maths done and use up some of that infinite energy!
• Modify a game of Twister so that the circles have numbers in them. Right hand red becomes right hand 3x4. It’s one for the brain and the body!

Not only are we far more likely to want to spend time doing things that we enjoy, but research shows that there’s a beneficial link between enjoyment and the development of authentic learning and long-term memory. By keeping learning light-hearted and making it fun for both of you, instead of tears at the times tables you might end up with cheers at the times tables!

2. Make it real!

Written words and numbers may be second nature to us as adults but put yourself in the mind of a child discovering that some squiggly marks on a page make the sounds ‘d’ ‘o’ ‘g’ and if you put them together that somehow represents your canine companion Buster. 

You’re just coming to terms with this, and the fact that x is for xylophone 🤔, but then they tell you that x can also go in between other squiggles that don’t have sounds but represent words which are actually numbers and now it means a word you can barely pronounce, multiplication. It’s all very abstract at the age of 6! 

Luckily we can help them out by making multiplication more physical and finding opportunities to practice in every day tasks.

• When baking cupcakes, maybe each cake needs 5 pink stars. How many stars will they need for 6 cakes? It’s a delicious way to work out 5x6.
• If you’re doing a spot of gardening together and you need 8 seeds in each pot, how many seeds will they need to fill 3 pots? How wonderful when their multiplication results in 24 flowers!
• Weave multiplication into the things they already enjoy. If they score 2 goals in their football match, ask them how many they’d score in 5 matches. They won’t even notice they’re learning!

Once they get comfortable with multiplication as a real-world tangible concept, then we can introduce the written version. Not only will those squiggles start to make a bit more sense but they’ll be linked to a happy memory of doing something fun 🥰.

 

3. Make it regular!

The first month of the year should probably be renamed Gymuary. Let’s face it, we all start out with the best intentions. We show up and we work our Nike socks off at least 3... maybe 4 times. Then, exhausted from our efforts and aching in muscles we’ve never met before, we take a little break. Not long. We return in March... once. But we make that session count! Before we know it, our gym gear has been relegated to the bottom of the washing basket, our water bottle has spawned its own ecosystem and one of our socks has disappeared entirely.

This is good news if our aim is to support the fitness industry but not so great for our efforts to be healthy. It is, however, very human. Life gets in the way. Sometimes season 4 of Succession gets in the way 😬. But if you want your kids to have the best chance at conquering their times tables, and catching up in class if they’ve fallen behind, it’s better to commit to small, daily efforts rather than than a marathon session every three months.

There’s a term in Japanese, Kaizen, which is a business philosophy that promotes small continuous improvement. A really effective way of adopting a Kaizen approach is by incentivising daily practice with a habit tracker or a streak chart. Many creators, athletes and even apps harness the power of the streak.

The idea is that your child makes a cross on a chart or a calendar when they complete their daily times tables practice. Once they’ve managed this a few days in a row, they have a streak and once they have a streak, they’re going to want to keep it up. If you think about it, the Japanese have been instilling this philosophy into us since they brought us the Tamagotchi...

Before they know it, they start to see the results of their daily commitment which provides further incentive to keep the streak going. You can even give them an extra reward for keeping up a 5 day or a 10 day streak. If they got to a 50 day streak, I can almost guarantee they’d see a significant improvement in their times tables! 

You can make your own streaks chart, you can get an app or you can download our charts here:

Another secret to consistency is removing obstacles. Make it as easy as possible for you and your child to practice daily, it doesn’t even have to be long. Work it in to your daily routine and use untapped time, that’s time where you’re doing something that’s not occupying all of your brain. For example, 5 minutes on the daily commute to school is a perfect time to practice a few multiplications. Even 1 minute over breakfast is enough to get in 5 to 10 questions. Decide what you can commit to, do it daily. It’ll be so successful you might even consider digging out those gym socks…

4. Take your time

The to-do list involved in raising a human is unbelievable. Babies literally know nothing. We have to teach them how to brush their teeth, how to put their shoes on. They don’t even know how you’re supposed to pretend to look at your phone before turning around when you realise you’re going the wrong way.

So it’s understandable if you didn’t get round to teaching them the times tables before you discovered that they’re struggling with them at school. And if that’s the case, it can be tempting to rush to make sure they don’t fall behind or that they’re prepared for the next test, but do your best to resist this temptation. If we learnt anything from Home Alone it’s that rushing leads to disaster. And a road trip with a polka band...

When we race through the curriculum without ensuring that underlying concepts have been completely understood, we’re likely to come unstuck down the line. It’s better to sacrifice a couple of test results now to give students a grounding that will serve them in the long run.

After all, preparing kids for exams is important but what’s far more important is preparing them for life. Making sure they have the maths skills, as well as the patience and perseverance to deal with every day challenges, not just a head crammed full of facts that’ll fall out before they even call ‘pencils down’. Especially since, controversial opinion, many of these tests seem to be more for the schools than the students.

So take your time, remember that learning is very much about the journey not the destination. Giving kids the space to explore, the time to understand, will ensure that they’ll develop a healthy relationship with learning, that they understand that mastery takes time. As any chef will tell you, if you rush a soufflé you end up with soup.

So those are my top tips for mastering the times tables without the tears. I hope you find them helpful and you’re fired up and ready to embark upon a fun mathventure with your child!

If you’re looking for a really great resource that’ll actually teach you how to multiply without just memorising, check out our Complete Guide to the Times Tables Ebook. It’s fun, it’s fully illustrated, it’s jam packed with helpful techniques for multiplication as well as loads of fun tricks and hundreds of practice questions. We’ve also got a matching set of bookmarks which are really good as revision cards and they look great too.

Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram for our weekly mental maths training and reels to make you go 🤯 . Have a mathemagical day 🤘🏽.