Maths Blog

Stop Rote Learning – Stop holding your children back

Times tables are one of those things which everyone has to learn. Tables are traditionally things that have been learnt a certain way over the years.

People know they can learn their tables, but these are taught to us in a rote fashion, and to get them right takes a long time and a lot of effort.This means learning multiplication tables is slow, unproductive, and involves too much thinking, as we are taught them in a linear fashion.

For example schools still teach times tables by getting children to read or say them out loud repeatedly, or using some another form of repetition such as this:

1 x 2 = 2

2 x 2 = 4

3 x 2 = 6

This is rote learning and there is a much better and far easier way for your children to learn the tables! How?

You can learn the tables by rote and most of us do, however, the problem is that as you are learning them in an auditory fashion, this means you read them in a linear way – from 1 x to 10 x.The tables are therefore stored in your brain in the same linear way, and their recall is also linear so you can end up going through all of them to get to your answer.

If you ask a child having learnt it this way what 6 x 6 is, they will often go through the tables 3 x 6, 4 x 6 to get to the answer – I know that my daughters and son did! If the effort to recall was too much for them, they simply stopped.

If you do recall in this linear way you can get the right answer but as you can imagine, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to learn the tables this way.

Now you would think that if you answere a tables question 20 times then you should know answer instantly, but it does not work like that. If it took you more than a fraction of a second to come to the answer , then you have used the linear method to extract the answer – you had to think about it.

A child will usually go through the same process repeatedly to get the right answer. This is not using your memory in the most productive way.

What is needed is a method that will give you an instant answer.

There are better techniques to learn your tables using Memory Sheets which utilise the way your memory works and result in instant recall of the tables with little effort and the effort that is put in is interesting and fun and not boring like the rote learning method. Wouldn’t a fun method be better for your children?

You can find out more about the instant recall method of learning tables from this Blog and our reports.

As grown ups, we have already learned our tables, however, we can make a huge difference to our children and their abilities.

Please do stop rote learning times tables as it only holds your children back and makes learning boring rather than fun and very easy.

There really is a better way by using Memory Sheets as these teach the tables so that your children have instant recall without having to think what the answer is!