A very interesting article from the Primary & Early Years Magazine shared by the NCETM has looked at how children learn times tables. Children need to learn their tables facts to a required level of automaticity which can be challenging - committing a large number of facts to their long term memory which they can then recall to apply in different contexts and solve problems. One of the key messages here is that remembering stuff matters! How do we learn them? We might remember how we did it ourselves - perhaps by 'rote' or repetition? While this is really effective method, the article makes a key point that we need to develop understanding and 'reasoning' alongside the fluency. It's not just about remembering 7 x 8 = 56 but that I've got 7 people and 56 sweets for my party - how am I going to share them? Or what number between 50 and 60 has the factors of 7 and 8?
Here's another suggestion from the article:
ALL, SOME, NONE
Write three or four random numbers on the board. Pupils talk with a partner, using a whiteboard and pen if that helps, to construct three sentences about those numbers, using the words ‘all, some, none?’
E.g. 2, 7, 11
“All of the numbers are prime”
“Some of the numbers are odd”
“None of the numbers are factors of 15”
All these statements lead into some good dialogue about number.
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