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| Pupils need to learn their tables there is no way round it. The problem is that there is no fun, and therefore no motivation involved, its just a grind. Furthermore pupils simply do not have a strategy for learning their tines tables. The result of this is often that the 2, 3, 5 10 and maybe 4 times get learnt but the hard bit at the upper end of the 6, 7, 8 and nine times tables is sometimes less well internalised. Tables Thing as my pupils call it introduces an element of competition and motivation into the learning of tables and takes less than 15 minutes to administer and mark. Whenever I have used it there have been massive gains in tables knowlegde and recall across the whole range of ability. |
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Tables_Thing NEW Tables Thing Advanced - up to 12x tables without 1s and 10s The student sheet Either- Right click and select Save Target As... to download:the pupil sheet Or if your browser will display .pdf files just click and print (it takes a moment or two to load) pupil_sheet.pdf
http://www.timeleft.info/ to get a timer for your Windows PC http://www.chimoosoft.com/timer.html to get a timer if you are using a Mac
How to use tables thing:
Download and install a timer PC double click the timeleft.exe file and follow the onscreen instructions to install.
Mcc double click the Chimoo Timer.app
The activity:
Give out the pupil sheets.
Click the link to the Tables Thing
The body of the grid will be empty Ask the students to copy the numbers into the grey cells on one of the grids on the student sheet.
The grid works like a jumbled table square - ask the students to fill in the product where each column and row intersect.
Start the timer and give the students five minutes.
Any students finishing the grid in under 5 minutes call out "Finished" and the teacher read the time off the timer and they write it in the 'time' slot on the student sheet.
At the end of five minutes tell all the students to stop and write 5.00 in the time slot on the student sheet.
Ask them to put crosses in any squares that are blank (to stop their mates filling them in later when they are being marked). Swap papers to mark
Click the Solve button and all the body of the grid will fill in NOTE : Clicking Clear will empty the body of the grid and re - jumble the numbers Read the answers a row at a time - children only put a cross on a wrong answer - right answers are left alone.
Your score is the time in seconds plus one second for each cross
The object is to get zero crosses and finish the grid as quickly as possible. Lowest score wins
I have had students that never got to zero crosses and those that could get it all right in 2min 23 secs. but it's not a race against each other - the competition for each pupil is with himself - to gain a better and better score.
The point is that with regular practice everyone I have ever used this with has made significant improvement. Doing every times table every day in a random order achieves this. Moreover it allows students to form a strategy to learn their tables by jotting down the table sum represented by say 5 crosses and concentrating on just those 5, and so on the next time until they crack it
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Tables 
