Multiplication facts…a stressful tale as old as time! I remember being drilled these facts in school as a student and as a teacher. I will say, once I started teaching these facts every year they became much more engrained in my mind. I would have enjoyed these math coloring worksheets for multiplication!
After my years in the classroom, I will always support repetition as a method of learning. I know many people like to get away from this type of memorizing, but there is a place for it. Understanding and memorizing can work together!
Make Math Fun!
That being said, finding a fun way to practice these facts is always preferable to keep kids engaged. The multiplication coloring pages in my shop are a way to combine the fine motor skills of a coloring sheet with the extra practice needed on those multiplication skills.
Well, that was a bit of a tangent! Can you tell I am passionate about education, and especially math. Math has such a bad rep for being boring and hard but it doesn’t have to be that way! We can show our students that we can commit facts and knowledge to memory while understanding it and having fun. These number multiplication worksheets are a great way to help our kids practice and learn their times tables.
No Need To Rush
One thing I have noticed through all my teaching years is that some concepts just need more time. Regardless of the grade your child is in or the amount of lessons designated to it in the curriculum, basic facts are crucial.
One of the many benefits of homeschooling is the ability to be able to teach to mastery. There is no benefit or need to move on before a child is ready. Moving forward without developing of a good foundation with these math skills and math facts will just lead to frustration and struggles down the road. It is much easier to take a few extra weeks for multiplication practice in 3rd grade than it is to realize your older kids can’t do their advanced math in high school because they don’t know their multiplication tables.
Learning For All Ages
Kids of all ages can begin to learn these more difficult concepts by learning to make equal groups. Just separating your blocks into groups of 2 is an introduction into these basic operations!
In its earliest stages, multiplying is skip counting anyways. You may not realize it, but teaching your young learners to skip count is training them to become a third grader who can learn their multiplication tables. Whether you integrate these printable coloring multiplication pages into your daily math work or set them up in a math center a day or two a week, they can be useful.
Teaching Multiplication Tables Creatively
There are many creative ways to help your child learn their multiplication tables. Many times, when a child is struggling to learn something, they just need to be taught it in a different way. Some of those ways are:
1. Using Songs
You can use something like Musical Multiplication from The Good and the Beautiful or search skip counting or multiplication songs on Youtube. The skip counting songs helped one of my daughters commit some of the more difficult multiplication families to memory. This is a very low prep activity!
2. Grid Paper Arrays
Some curriculums will use this method and some will not, but I find this can help for a visual learner. On graph paper, you draw an array – which is essentially a box to fit them dimensions of the multiplication fact.
For example if the question is 3 x 4 you would draw a line down that includes 3 squares, over 4 and then close it up into a box. However may little squares are inside your large shape is the answer. You can view this in rows, columns, or individual squares.
Different brains will see it differently. This gives a child good experience in visualizing what a multiplication question is asking for.
3. Use Manipulatives
For those kids who really learn best when their hands are moving, bring in some manipulatives! Grab some linking cubes of different colors or set up some math stations with toy animals and have your child figure out how many animals they have in total if they 3 lambs, 3 horses and 3 cows.
There are many educational activities you can do that will involve math fun. Let your imagination run free here! (Or let Pinterest’s imagination run free!)
4. Games
There are many different versions of multiplication games out there, but often simple is best. The object is always getting more comfortable with times table facts. There are bingo games you can buy (or could easily make) and various games you could play with a deck of cards.
You could do a version of the game WAR where you each have half the deck of cards. You flip your top cards over and the first person to shout out the answer of those 2 numbers multiplied gets both cards. You play until someone has no cards left.
If you had a group of kids together they could play around the world, where they do one on one battles to say the answer to a flash card. The winner moves on to the next child. When you lose, you stop there and the winner moves on. See who moves the most times to determine the final winner.
5. Repetition
It is not always popular within “the new math”, but it can be effective for some kids. At some point, having these facts committed to memory is going to be a huge asset. There is going to come a time when the questions will be getting hard enough that you don’t want to be constantly skip counting or making arrays.
Likely, that time is going to come when you start doing long division!! In long division, without a general knowledge of the multiplication facts, it is going to get very difficult.
There will come a time where your child is starting to grasp the concept of multiplication and then it will just be a matter of time to commit these facts to memory. The more multiplication math problems your child completes, the more the fact fluency they will gain.
Math Coloring Pages for Multiplication
These multiplication math coloring pages in my shop can help combine the fun with the great practice that repetition brings. In the 1o page bundle there are a variety of multiplication number worksheets such as coloring in products to find a hidden picture, solve the mystery picture by doing multiplication, use correct colors to finish a picture once you have solved the times table problem, mad minutes and much more.
Don’t miss out on these multiplication printables in the shop! Have fun and solidify those fundamental mathematical skills.
If you enjoy these printables, please share them! I hope they are helpful for you!
Happy schooling!
Leave a Reply