Perhaps because there haven’t been quite enough changes to primary assessment in England this year (ahem), Year 6 pupils will also have to contend with an on-screen times-tables test next year, which will form part of the key stage 2 Sats.
While I sense that this will be somewhat of a technical and logistical nightmare, it is worth considering what part tech can play in helping children to master their times tables.
There’s no getting away from it: practice is key when it comes to learning your tables and there are plenty of free web tools and apps that give children opportunities to do this.
Some, like Hit the Button, are useful in the early stages of learning a particular times table because children are given the possible answers and have to select the right one.
Others, like Tables Test, use the multiplication grid format, which can help children to spot patterns and get to grips with the commutative law for multiplication (essentially, 5 x 2 results in the same answer as 2 x 5). It’s also useful for proving to children that they may already know many of the multiplication facts of a times table that they consider tricky, if they can recall other times tables.
Similarly, Learn Times Tables takes this idea a little further with a game that progresses by ignoring the times tables that a user already knows. It uses a colour system to signify this: if the correct answer is given in less than four seconds it turns green, yellow for less than six seconds, orange for less than eight seconds and red for any answer that takes longer than eight seconds. The program will ask more red questions and so on.
Meanwhile, competition can be a great motivator in the classroom and systems like Times Tables Rockstars makes good use of that. Sign your whole school up for £60 a year and unlock a system that encourages daily times-table practice. Children can play single or multiplayer games and work their way through the ranks of Busker, Rock Star and Rock Legend, depending on how quickly and accurately they can answer the questions. The teacher can select which times tables are focused on each week, but there is a 20-week schedule that can be used as a guide. There are lots of printable resources, too.
Of course, you could also combine learning times tables with a bit of programming and challenge pupils to code their own self-marking times-table quiz using Scratch or even a game where they have to spot multiples of a given number.
Whatever methods you choose, finding different ways to regularly challenge children to retrieve multiplication facts can help to develop how the memory is stored - and that’s ultimately what’s needed to master learning times tables.
Claire Lotriet is a teacher at Henwick Primary School in London. She tweets at @OhLottie and blogs at www.clairelotriet.com
This is an article from the 8 April edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
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