As a conclusion to Maths Week 2011 and as an aside to this year’s Tables Tips Twitter Project, I am resurrecting an article about learning tables off by heart.  This post originally appeared on Anseo.net back in January 2008.  Almost … Read on…

Throughout Maths Week, teachers around the country were asked to give tips for learning multiplication tables using the hashtag, #tablestips, on Twitter.  We had a good response with 16 teachers tweeting lots of different tips.  The most popular tip involved … Read on…

This year Maths Week takes place in Ireland from 15th to 22nd October.  Already in its sixth year, the event has gained huge popularity.  This year, I’ve decided to try out a Twitter project for the week to help children … Read on…

One of the challenges of the modern era when answers are instant is giving children the skills to recall facts quickly – facts they probably do need to know. For example, if they are baking a load of cakes and … Read on…

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen how we don’t need to simply learn any of the tables by rote.  We’ve reduced the 121 facts to learn down to just 4: 3×3, 3×6, 3×7 and 3×8.

Now there is … Read on…

With only 10 tables left to learn, perhaps it’s time to call it a day on the strategies.  Surely, 10 tables aren’t that difficult to simply learn off by heart?  In my opinion, I think even one table to learn … Read on…

We’re almost coming to the end of our series on strategies to learn multiplication tables without learning anything off by heart.  So far all our strategies involve a rule to remember or an image to visualise.  For example if a … Read on…

So far, we’ve whipped through the tables at breakneck speed so it’s probably time to slow things down a little.  Speaking of time, that’s what we’re going to use for our next strategy.  I think the clock is a great … Read on…

So far in our series, we’ve learned some strategies to lessen our load when learning tables.  We haven’t yet had to learn anything off and we’re already down to the last 28 tables.  In this lesson we’re going to lose … Read on…

In the last session we learned that by learning nothing off by heart, we could reduce the number of number facts to be learned off from 121 to 35.  For me, that’s not good enough so in this session I’m … Read on…