Building strong math skills is essential for both the academic and life success of your child. As a secondary school math teacher, it is clear to me that basic addition and multiplication skills lay the foundation for success in the mathematics and science subjects at school. This has significant roll-on effects for your child’s life including their future education, employment, lifespan and general happiness.
For the majority of children these skills require hard work to master, but the effort that we as parents invest in this is well worth it.
We do not need to experts in the field of education in order to give our kids a great headstart to their education in this area. Solid, regular practice of the multiplication tables will help your child to memorise these important facts. Addition practice gives similar results.
The purpose of this work is to allow your child the freedom to concentrate on new skills that are taught in math classes at school without the need to continually refer to addition or multiplication tables. The result is more productive math lessons. There is nothing like success in a lesson or a subject to promote confidence and enthusiasm in your child.
I make times tables practice a regular feature of my classroom math teaching regardless of the age of my students. I have seen children of all ages from eight to fifteen rapidly improve their mental math skills as a result. Consequently, these students have gained confidence and skill in this subject. This has even applied to students who had no faith in their own abilities in math before this practice was undertaken.
Combined with a variety of learning-centered math games, this basic drilling of facts has a profound effect on a child. They can see that the work is not only possible, but even enjoyable. This is truly the pathway to success, for a child that wants to study math will have many more options open to them in life than one who does not.
By: Roger Vanderlely
Posts Tagged ‘Times Tables’
Math – Essential Academic And Life Skills
April 11th, 2010Times Tables – the Worst Way to Teach Multiplication
November 22nd, 2009Learning the “multiplication tables” is one of the first traumas that children usually face when learning arithmetic.
Ask ten elementary-school kids to tell you what, say, eight times seven is. Watch as they look up and to their left (or right) and go into, “let’s-see” mode. Often you’ll hear them say, “Um, ah…” before give you the answer. Generally, there’s a lot of hesitation. Only then, do they actually give you the answer. Sometimes it’s even correct.
I know, I was one of them. Maybe you were, too. Most children are victimized by the thoughtless, authoritarian, wrong way to teach the “multiplication facts” (what a stupid term!)
Why are “the tables” the wrong way to learn? Maybe I can illustrate it best by analogy. Imagine that you wanted your children to learn the names of all their cousins, aunts and uncles. But you never actually let them meet or play with them. You just showed them pictures of them, and told them to memorize their names.
Each day you’d have them recite the names, over and over again. You’d say, “OK, this is a picture of your great-aunt Beatrice. Her husband was your great-uncle Earnie. They had three children, your uncles Harpo, Zeppo, and Gummo. Harpo married your aunt Leonie…yadda, yadda, yadda.
Boring!
But what if you had them all over for the weekend, and you found out Earnie did magic tricks, Beatrice had been a rodeo queen, Zeppo always wore mismatching socks, Harpo played the, well, you know, Gummo picked his nose and wiped it on his tie, and Leonie could sing like an angel?
Well, then you’d have some relationship with them, wouldn’t you? The next time you saw Earnie, you’d ask him to show you a trick. You’d ask his daughter Leonie if she could teach you to sing, and you’d stay away from Gummo’s tie.
It turns out that you can build relationships with multiplications, as well. And they have relationships with each other. You already know some of them. Like the relationship of nine to ten. Nine is one less than ten, so when you multiply something by nine, just stick a zero at the end of it, and subtract the original number.
Take the example 8*9. Just stick a zero behind the 8 to get 80. Next, subtract 8 from 80, and you’ve got 72, which is the correct answer to 8 multiplied by 9.
That is the intuitive way for many people to multiply by 9. So why do they make you stare at the nine-times-table in school? It’s boring and fosters no sense of the relationship of nine to the other numbers. It turns multiplication into isolated “multiplication facts” (there’s that stupid term again).
If you had children multiply by nine with the subtraction method often enough, they’d know the answers in their bones after awhile. It would take less time than it would to memorize the nine-times-tables by rote, and it would have them actively involved with using the numbers. Imagine that!
This may be hard to digest at first, because learning the “multiplication facts” by rote has been ingrained into the school system for decades. Maybe that is why our children are getting worse and worse at this easy, important skill.
If you’re a teacher, you’re probably fed up with the bad mojo from the policy-makers. You need to get your own mojo working. Find out how to get started at http://learn2multiply.com
By: Brian Foley
