A complete unit with direct instruction to the student, ample practice problems and word problems. Common Core aligned. Great for independent practice/homework.

This unit concentrates on teaching the multiplication tables in a specific order. It is a comprehensive teaching resource with lessons and exercises to introduce or review the multiplication tables. The lessons include a way to drill a specific table but, also, have many other related exercises, including word problems.

The unit assumes that the students already know the concept of multiplication. It is best preceded by my other unit, Multiplication Concept.

I have created a systematic approach to memorizing times tables. In this method, one table is studied at a time until it is mastered. The individual tables are NOT studied in the order of 2, 3, 4, etc. but instead the “easy” tables of 2, 5, 10, and 11 are studied first.

The study order also includes studying the table of 4 right after the table of 2, and studying the table of 6 right after the table of 3, because the skip-counting patterns of those tables share some similarities. The lessons emphasize the fact that one multiplication fact is always in two different tables. This way, when the student gets to the hardest tables, the tables of 7, 8, and 12, there are only a few totally new facts to learn.

We always start the study of each table by memorizing the skip-counting pattern 7, 14, 21, 28, etc. Then we work on memorizing which fact is associated with which answer. This way your students not only know what is 8 x 7 but also know all of it “backwards” - that 56 is in the tables of 8 and 7. That knowledge will be an enormous help later, when the students learn division, factorizing, and finding LCM's or GCF's.

The unit also includes a 12x12 grid at the end of almost every lesson. The boxes for those answers that have not been studied yet are shaded and are not to be filled. Little by little, the shaded areas become fewer and fewer, and the progress is very visible to the student.

I encourage you also to use games for motivation and for practice. I have included a list of online multiplication games for that purpose. Of course, board and card games are perfect as well. However, games are not enough in themselves. The memorization also requires a mental effort from the student:

sitting down with the skip-counting list, then with the facts, reading them, and then trying to remember them. The basic age-old technique of covering the list and trying to remember it is still very effective!

I do not want to discount the value of songs or mnemonic devices, but they tend to isolate the facts in the child's mind as separate “odd trivia”. This unit shows the patterns found in the multiplication tables in order to keep the facts in a structured context, and emphasizes learning the tables “backwards” in order to facilitate learning division.

The unit also includes a guide for the teacher titled Effective Oral Drilling. This drilling is structured, not random, and is based on the patter in the table itself

Table of 2 - 11 new facts to learn.

Table of 4 - 10 new facts. These are doubles of those in the table of two.

Table of 10 - 9 easy facts.

Table of 5 - 8 new facts.

More Practice and Review is a break from memorizing new tables.

Table of 3 - 7 new facts.

Table of 6 - 6 new facts. These are doubles of those in the table of 3.

Table of 11 - 5 new facts, four of them are easy.

Table of 9 - 4 new facts.

Table of 7 - 3 new facts.

Table of 8 - 2 new facts.

Table of 12 - 1 new fact.

I wish you success with math teaching!

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This means the student can fill it in using a computer or a tablet (distance learning).

The student will need to use either Adobe Reader (on desktop/laptop) or a PDF app that has annotation tools (phones or tablets). Several PDF apps with annotation capabilities exist; see more details here.

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It is recommended that you not share the entire PDF file with students. Instead, it is better to just give the students a few pages at a time. Here is a simple method for extracting a few pages from a PDF file. It is done using Google Chrome.

1. Open the PDF file in Chrome.

2. Go to "Print" (Ctrl+P).

3. Print to PDF, and choose the page range.

4. Click the "Save" button.