Multiplication Tables

Well, this is a little unusual for the Baby Buffaloe Blog, but I thought if it was so useful to us, that I might as well put it out there on the internet.

Amelie and I have had a time with her multiplication tables - even with lots and lots of repetition and many different approaches, she was still struggling with the memorization. So I googled "multiplication facts strategies for dyslexia" and found one idea that we hadn't tried is to learn a story to trigger the fact, and I thought to myself, "Yes, Amelie will be able to memorize this complicated story easier than she's been able to recall her math facts."

There are a few different books/story sets out there - one is Times Alive. Here's an example video:


We went with Times Tales, since it was available for checkout from the library. Here's a sample page:

We watched the 30-minute Part I immediately, and Amelie learned the stories and multiplication facts for her 3's and 4's just in the time it took to watch the video. It suggested waiting a week between Part I and Part II, and Amelie decided on her own to do two pages a day from the printables that came with it. She did the first two pages in about 3 minutes with no hassling from me (which is fairly different from our usual math homework routine) and repeated the performance with the next two pages the next day - done in a snap with all correct answers!

Part II is the rest of the 6's, 7's, 8's and 9's. We followed the program the way the DVD suggested, by watching the video and practicing those for a week, then watching part II of the DVD and practicing those for another week. We have reviewed it very briefly off and on since then, but it's been several months and she's retained the facts (and still knows the stories) in a way that didn't click before. It did still take practice, but it was really pretty painless.

With the Times Tales, they associate each of the numbers 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 with a character and then there's a story for each of the character pairings (so, 6 is always "the 6th grade class" and 4 is always a chair, like in the example page above). If your elementary schooler has been struggling with multiplication facts, I'd highly recommend it.

Click here for the referral link to the company's website. (I'll get a credit)

Or, you could check the video out from the library like we did.