Multiplication in 10 days
A systematic plan to teach multiplication.
Our 7 year old knows how to do addition and subtraction. Now it’s time to teach him multiplication. Here is our 10 day plan.
Don’t rush it - you can teach it in 1 hour but you do want the kids to enjoy it and be confident doing it, don’t you?
We first ask him to memorize multiplication tables from 1 to 10.
This task is plain memorization. Do 1-5 on day 1 - repeat to a parent on day 2.
Spend day 2 just repeating and perfecting. 1-5.
Add fun things like putting a timer on, keeping a small prize if he/she does it correctly and so on. Our boy loves timers.
Do 6-10 on day 3. Repeat and perfect on day 3, 4 and 5.
Spend day 6 repeating and perfecting 1 to 10.
Now he can tell the table from 1 through 10 but he can only do it sequentially. He still can’t tell you something like what 7x8 are.
Day 7, 8, 9 are for written excercises. We ask him to complete 50 1-digit multiplications in one sitting.
I fill in a notebook with questions like 5x9, 8x8, 9x7 etc. It took him about 20 minutes on first try. He still arrived at the answers by going through the multiplication table sequentially.
However, if we repeat this task multiple times, he starts recalling and doesn’t need to do the sequential thing.
For perfection, we keep score every time we do it and I also put a bonus question like 11x6 that he gets more points for.
His daily score is improving and now he can do 1-digit multiplications in his head.
Day 10 is when I teach multiplication for 2 or more digits.
To continue to receive more such content, please subscribe to the newsletter. It’s completely free for life for the first 100 subscribers.