I know I am far from the first person to think of this, but here's a new strategy for my Basic Math kids.
So on the second day as a diagnostic tool I had them fill in a 15 by 15 multiplication chart. I wanted to see how well they knew their basic math facts. I had expected for them to mostly be able to fill in the ten by ten section quickly and easily and struggle with the rest. What happened was this small exercise I thought would take ten to fifteen minutes took the entire hour, even with me helping students with strategies to fill in the charts, giving strategies, etc. . .
So, I have decided that every day in class we will be devoting between 5 and 10 minutes to basic multiplication facts. We will be doing this for the rest of the quarter, and will most likely focus on division facts next quarter, and then integers, and so forth. . .
So as a daily way of practicing multiplication, I took a bunch of blank cards ( you can buy them in bulk from amazon here), and wrote the products from the 10 by 10 grid on them. For example, I had a bunch of cards with 12 on their face, and only one with 25. I then would pair students up, and have them flip over a card, and they each had to come up with a different way of getting that product through multiplication. Using 1 * anything was a last resort.
I was surprised how quickly some students could tell me that 36 was six times six or nine times four, yet those same students couldn't tell what nine times four was two days earlier.
So on the second day as a diagnostic tool I had them fill in a 15 by 15 multiplication chart. I wanted to see how well they knew their basic math facts. I had expected for them to mostly be able to fill in the ten by ten section quickly and easily and struggle with the rest. What happened was this small exercise I thought would take ten to fifteen minutes took the entire hour, even with me helping students with strategies to fill in the charts, giving strategies, etc. . .
So, I have decided that every day in class we will be devoting between 5 and 10 minutes to basic multiplication facts. We will be doing this for the rest of the quarter, and will most likely focus on division facts next quarter, and then integers, and so forth. . .
So as a daily way of practicing multiplication, I took a bunch of blank cards ( you can buy them in bulk from amazon here), and wrote the products from the 10 by 10 grid on them. For example, I had a bunch of cards with 12 on their face, and only one with 25. I then would pair students up, and have them flip over a card, and they each had to come up with a different way of getting that product through multiplication. Using 1 * anything was a last resort.
I was surprised how quickly some students could tell me that 36 was six times six or nine times four, yet those same students couldn't tell what nine times four was two days earlier.