How to learn the times tables

The order that works

Teaching the tables in numerical order is the most common mistake, because it puts the hardest table in the middle and the easiest right at the end. Start with 2, 10 and 5 — every one of them has a pattern a child can see in under a minute, and between them they cover a third of the grid. Then 3 and 4, which build on doubling. Then 6, 8 and 9, all of which can be derived from tables already known. Leave 7 near the end, and finish with 11 and 12.

How long and how often

Ten minutes a day beats seventy minutes on a Sunday, and it is not close. Memory consolidates between sessions rather than during them, so the number of separate sessions matters more than the total time. Aim for six short sessions a week, and stop each one while it is still going well — ending on a run of correct answers is what makes a child willing to start again tomorrow.

Ask, do not show

Reading a table out loud is a warm-up, not practice. The work happens when a child has to retrieve an answer without seeing it. That is why flash cards, blank grids and quick-fire questions do so much more than chanting, and it is why the practice steps on every table page ask before they ever tell.

Find the real gaps

Almost no child is missing a whole table. They are missing four or five specific facts and slowing down every time one appears. A blank 12×12 grid, timed, will find them in three minutes. The usual suspects are 7 × 8, 6 × 8, 7 × 9, 6 × 7 and 8 × 9 — practise those five on their own rather than running the whole table again.

Halve the work

Because 7 × 6 and 6 × 7 give the same answer, the 144 facts in the grid are really only 78 — and once the 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s are gone, barely twenty are genuinely hard. Showing a child that the chart is a mirror is one of the few moments in this topic where the job visibly gets smaller.

When a table will not stick

Change what the practice looks like before you add more of it. Move from typing to saying, from a screen to a printed grid, from a timer to no timer. If one fact is the problem, give it a story or a rhyme of its own — "56 = 7 × 8" runs 5, 6, 7, 8 in order, and that single sentence fixes the most-missed fact in the whole grid for a lot of children.

Timers and anxiety

Speed matters, because a fact that has to be worked out is not yet learnt. But a timer put in front of an anxious child measures their anxiety rather than their tables. Use the untimed games while a table is new — flash cards and matching — and bring in the clock only once the answers are already arriving. On this site the timed games are deliberately separate from the learning steps for that reason.

Take it off the page

Eggs come in sixes and twelves, hands come in fives, a week is seven days, a clock face is the 5 times table. Counting real groups gives the facts somewhere to live. A child who has worked out how many eggs are in nine boxes has done 6 × 9 and will remember it better than the child who wrote it forty times.