What has that got to do with printable times table sheets?

You the parents are looking for tables to print and so feel that they are useful.

It is a good thing to do but what type of tables are you going to print?  Here we are going to guide you to print out the best times tables sheets.

Usually you will print out the tables of the whole tables.  We have all seen the 2 x 3, 3 x 3 etc., if you do that it give you a guide and shows you what to learn but you are left with the standard tried and tested way of learning tables.

It is time consuming and tiring and children don’t look forward to learning that way.

What you need is something memorable, that is also fun for children. Adding colour and images adds to this and helps in learning the multplication times tables. So if you are printing out printable times tables sheets, try to make them memorable.

But that fact is that all motion creates emotion, all movement creates emotion and the focus of this article is to highlight this point and its relevance to children’s education.

Movement is such an important thing, especially for children, and we all know that children are continually in motion, they are always moving around, they are always doing things. Moving is their natural state of being and they are at their happiest when able to move.

However, when at school they are expected to sit at their tables for most of the time and learn. The logistics of teaching in a formal setting means they if they were moving around all the time it would be total chaos.

But what about in the home?

The expectation is that children will sit down quietly and get on with learning just as if they were in school. It is really important to realise this expectation is one of the greatest barriers to children doing work at home and leads to a lack of motivation.

However, the parent at home has a great advantage over the formal setting of the school and that is that children can be encouraged to move about and do things that they can’t do at school.

If movement can be introduced to academic work in the home then the motivation to do the work and to do it for longer periods will be high thereby increasing the rate of learning.

Children at home do not have to be sitting at a table writing and we have developed a number of systems that use movement as one of the keys to learning and tapping into the increased motivation that this brings.

The systems can be used for maths, literacy, writing, speaking and absorbing facts of all sorts.

One such system is Memory Mapping.

Children can do a memory map on the wall or produce it on a chart and just by doing so they have a freedom and an ease which gets them working at peak performance.

We encourage you to have some sort of board or easel up on a wall somewhere and to have plenty of pens available for drawing memory maps. Children love working in this way.

The map uses speaking and movement as the key to their learning. Testing how much children have learned about a subject, place or thing, anything really can be readily gleaned by you enabling you, the parent to interact and provide feedback to your children.

The great thing about speaking it is that it doesn’t have to happen whilst sitting in a chair. Children can be walking up and down the room, moving their arms about, play acting, anything that gets them absorbed in using movement and the memory mapping technique to learn. So, the whole process becomes more like play and as children like to play and have fun their motivation is raised.

To learn more on movement creating emotion and for how to create a brilliant learning environment and experience in the home and outside please do feel free to download any of the Blog and our free reports.

Surely movement is to do with physical education or sports and not maths!

When children are moving about they are happy.

Children therefore love to move and are always in perpetual motion whenever they have the choice. Do your children just sit still unless they have to?

The problem with Maths is that it is mostly learned by sitting still with children trying to get the number work into their heads whilst at the same time doing something that is not natural to them .i.e. being still.

Being still is therefore not the best way to learn especially for children, so what is?

Motion creates emotion and if you move about it can change how you feel, in children’s case it makes them happy and if children are happy they are much more likely to be motivated to work harder and for longer.

If you could find a way of bringing movement into learning maths this would improve motivation and therefore learning and greatly enhance the speed at which children learn.

The question arises how on Earth can movement be applied to the learning of maths?

In fact there is a way and I want to give you an example using multiplication tables.

As we are all aware the usual way that children are taught tables is to get them to sit still and cram the tables into their minds by using rote learning.

For example with the 3times table; 1×3 is 3, 2×3 is 6, 3×3 is 9, right up to 12×3 is 36.

The Learning Well has designed a system which is the simplest, easiest most efficient way of learning the tables and it uses movement. Because it involves movement it therefore creates motivation and a willingness to learn.

The system is based on Memory Sheets.

The sheets are placed by the children around the home in different locations. The locations are then revisited on many occasions in order to learn the tables.

More difficult tables are put in more unusual places, often somewhere that will cause children to laugh, for example the toilet.

strong>This makes the tables more fun to learn and they are therefore more memorable.

If your children are not sure of the tables when you test them they just go back and have a look again.

So in the process of walking around the home and having a look at the tables; your child is moving, having fun, being motivated and this makes learning much easier.

Remember, motion creates emotion. If you use this principle linking motion, movement and having fun to maths then the end result is instant learning of the tables. Other areas of maths can be learned in a similar way.

To learn more on Maths and Movement why not have a look at other areas of this Blog and The Learning Well Blog.

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!