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The Easiest Game to Teach Your 5s Times Table - for Adults

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Learning your times table needn't be anywhere near as hard and time-consuming as most people experience. Not because they're stupid, but because the traditional approach to learning them is!

This is certainly not intended to be an attack on those fine parents and teachers who know no better than to put their young ones through the age-old process. But bear with me and see why I believe it's time we shake this whole thing up!

As you read this article, bear in mind there is a very subtle difference between memorizing and remembering tables.

Notes

Note 1

These notes are as relevant for adults as for anyone else but many adults are particularly embarrassed about failing to master the times table as a child. If they then become parents, this problem can come back to haunt them over and over as their own children require support in this area and it can be difficult for some adults to admit weaknesses like this to their children.

Taking these ideas into account may lead to different conclusions when considering the times table for children or specifically boys and girls.

Note 2

To be clear, you need to define what you mean by 'easiest':

For example, it's surely important to take account of as many as possible of the following:

Are you desiring something that's easy to do, makes those times table answers easy to remember and easy to recall, easy to apply in other areas of mathematics and in real life situations, easy to retain over the longer term, or simply an approach that's best matched to your personal learning style to make the learning process easy?

See here for more information about how to take this into account kids, teens and adults.

Note 3

In the Numba Ninja System of mental multiplication, for the 5 times table, when 5 is chosen as the key, the Scissors is the picture story that is used.

When 5 is not the chosen key however, other picture stories are used as appropriate.

The Easiest Game to Teach Your 5s Times Table - for Adults

Study Multiplication

Here is a breakdown of the 5 times table. With the Numba Ninja System, each multiplication problem has a specific key, and this is underlined for each problem here. Special key combinations are used for multiplications above 12 times:

5 times table: up to 20 x 5

0 x 5 = 0
1 x 5 = 5
2 x 5 = 10
3 x 5 = 15
4 x 5 = 20
5 x 5 = 25
6 x 5 = 30
7 x 5 = 35
8 x 5 = 40
9 x 5 = 45
10 x 5 = 50
11 x 5 = 55
12 x 5 = 60
13 x 5 = 65
14 x 5 = 70
15 x 5 = 75
16 x 5 = 80
17 x 5 = 85
18 x 5 = 90
19 x 5 = 95
20 x 5 = 100

Study Ideas

Learn to Multiply

With games you have a great opportunity to engage with multiple senses (e.g. sight, sound and touch) to make your learning of the times table more effective. The learning advantages of this multi-sensory approach however are greatly enhanced when tightly associated with solving multiplication problems of increasing difficulty, provoking the learner to think rather than just develop point and click reflexes to a list of times table answers.

Also, be aware of why many people consider the times table to be limited to 12 x 12 when, in this decimal era the number 12 seems a rather strange limit. But this goes back to the days of counting in dozens (e.g. 12 inches in a foot) when an English shilling was worth 12 pennies.

Teach Multiplication

Many teachers regard the responsibility of learning the times table as something the student simply has to do, normally in their own time e.g. as a homework assignment. Then the teacher will use teaching time to test their students; to make sure they've completed their assignment. This is not teaching, but testing; and it is often embarrassing or even humiliating for students who have difficulty memorizing those lists of times table answers.

A far better approach, more in line with the expected role of a teacher, would be to actually teach students mental multiplication skill, which they could of course practice as a homework assignment. In the process of helping students develop such skills, the teacher would test as part of coaching that skill. This approach is far less threatening to students.

In recent years, many people have challenged how appropriate it is to attempt to learn the times table up to 12x12. Some prefer to limit the learning objective to 10x10 often citing decimalization as the reason for this, without speaking out the truth which underlies their motivation, being a preference to dumb-down the learning objective as it is then easier to accomplish.

On the other hand, those who value the ability to multiply (typically those who are comfortable themselves and often fail to see the problem through other people's eyes) suggest raising the bar to empower students with skills based on enlarging the times table to cover up to 20x20 or even 100x100. This kind of goal cries out for a skill-based approach, rather than memorization of number facts.

Teaching Ideas

Mastery