I am going to be teaching my 8 year old her multiplication facts here pretty soon. Are there any good resources out there to help it seem more like a fun, game type experience?? She gets frustrated and shuts down so easily unless it's a game, then she's good for a long time with less frustration and no shutting down. Thanks for any help you may be able to lend!!
Schoolhouse Rock videos are great, too. Target has the whole collection on disc for $13, but I think you can find all or most on Youtube.
Does she tend to retain things that are in story form? Is she more visual? If so, you might look at City Creek Press. http://www.citycreek.com/Default.asp?Redirected=Y They teach the times tables by creating a little visual story that the numbers engage in.
Question about Times Attacks... Are there any sort of teaching bits in it, or is it just fancy drills? (Don't get me wrong, I love the "fancy drill" idea and I'll probably get this for my boys. Just wondering.)
I'll look at the citycreek site. That sounds interesting. I haven't heard of it before. I think my older one would really enjoy that.
We learned all our multiplication last year. I did a combo of flashcards, school house rock videos (my son still sings them to himself as he is playing lol), and games from www.multiplication.com I also started out every math session by skip counting of any chosen number. I found that by doing a little of everything for a short time that we were able to get the goals accomplished before he grew bored and frustrated. After he learned most of his tables we ould have races on our large white board. I would write out mulitplication tables and he would have to fill in the answer. He took great joy in pushing me across the board in a hurry! lol Best of luck to you!
We loved the skip counting tapes. Yes, I said tapes. Can you tell I've been homeschooling a while? I guess these days you would order skip counting CDs. Haha! Anyway, skip counting (3,6,9,12,15, etc.) is the same things as multiplication. I'm a newbie around here so I don't think I'm suppose to post links but just google skip counting songs and you should find plenty. Here is an example: 3's sung to the tune of "Mary Had a Little Lamb". "three, six, nine, twelve, fi-ifteen, eeeighteen, twen-ty-one (that should take you through the melody line for "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb little lamb") twenty-four and twenty se-ven all the way to 30." (The first 3 is said where you would say "Ma", the 6 is sung where you would normally sing "ry". My musical children liked the skip counting tapes/cds. I have some that respond really well to incentives so we give them goals. One of my younger ones seems to stay envious of the older kids that have money. She loves to earn change my working on flash cards. When we introduce a new set, she can earn .25 cents by making it through her "3s" (or whatever the new set is) without a mistake. The key there is that I don't give them to her in order. She has to REALLY know them. That's all she needs. She will sit in a chair with a stack of flashcards and go to it. Other responded better to online games. I haven't found one "thing" that worked for all of them. I would suggest experimenting until you find something that lights the fire of excitement!
TimezAttack is just fancy drills. It accomplishes the same thing as flashcards... except my kids never complained about it LOL
All great ideas I love this site for this reason. I'll have to google the skip counting cd's. Those are right up all my kids' alley
I found this site as well: http://www.multiplication.com/interactive_games.htm Spent 20mins playing them myself The car race I really got a kick out of. You can even race against other online players if you want to.
Thank you for the suggestions. I am sure we can find something here that will work. She really likes TimezAttack
I bought a poster at the $1 store of the multiplication tables. I would sit with my back to it and use a set of flash cards. I'd pull a card and ask my DS for the answer. He faced the poster and me. He would look it up at it positioned over my head and I could watch his face. It went a little faster each time. He was memorizing where to look on the poster, yes. But he was also memorizing the tables themselves. I knew we beat it when he didn't have to look at the poster anymore. This worked because he felt it was easy. Told me it was like cheating because the answers were right there.
