“My students are no good at tables: How do I help them?”
“Where do I start?”
I am often asked this question, but before I answer fully let me explain that “tables” are part of the basic number facts (or single-digit number facts) that students need to learn. There are roughly 400 facts to learn:
- Addition Facts: 0 + 0 to 9 + 9
- Related subtraction facts i.e. if you know 7 + 2 = 9, then a related subtraction fact would be 9 – 2 = 7 and 9 – 7 = 2.
- Multiplication facts aka ‘the tables’ 0 = 0 to 10 + 10 in the Australian Curriculum
- Related Division facts. I.e. if you know 3 x 4 = 12, then you should know 12 ÷ 4 = 3 and 12 ÷ 3 = 4.
It is obviously not manageable to dump all of these on students at once – we need a whole school approach. To support teachers David Dunstan and I created the free Milestones for Addition/Subtraction and Multiplication/Division. You can download these here or see the web views below
These provide links to free resources to support students learning their basic number facts and a our suggested order to teaching the tables that we think will streamline the process of teaching the tables as it is designed to build on previous understandings. Many of our games and books in our collection focus on basic facts, and the following resources were especially designed to assist students to learn their tables.
