Here I am!  I promise I haven’t abandoned this little blog!  Life has been moving along at blinding speed.  I mean really, why can’t life just slow down to just nine kinds of crazy so I can put out a blog post every so often?  Oh well.  Someday I’ll be back on a more regular basis 😉  In the meantime, a friend was asking about teaching multiplication.  Since there’s not much multiplication without skip counting, I shared some ideas I’ve used with success. Peanut (9) has a problem with working memory, which means if I can make something visual it has much more of a chance of sticking around.  Here’s what we’ve done so far.

2’s:  First we took a tape measure and placed little Post-It strips on all of the odd numbers.  I pointed out that all of the numbers were even and they all ended with a 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8.  He practiced counting by 2’s by touching each exposed number.  The next time we worked on this, I pulled out the tape measure, he counted by twos while covering the odd numbers with his finger.  He loved that he could easily count this way for twenty-five feet.

3’s: I wrote each number on an index card and taped them to the wall in the hallway.  He had to chant the numbers as he touched them.  The most interesting thing we observed was that if he had trouble remembering, he would visualize the wall of numbers in the hall with his eyes closed, sometimes even reaching out to “tap” the invisible number as he counted.

4’s: Sidewalk chalk.  Lots of sidewalk chalk.  I wrote out the numbers 0-40.  He stood on zero, I asked him which number we would start with if counting by fours.  He moved to the number 4 and I drew a box around it.  He counted out four steps and stopped at the number 8; I drew a box around it.  We continued this until we got up to 40.  He went back to zero and could only jump to the correct number while counting by 4’s.  We saw how all of the 4’s are even numbers, so that meant multiples of two shared some of the same numbers as multiples of four.

5’s: Two colors of construction paper: 10 green and 10 pink.  Any number ending with a five was green, any number ending with a zero was pink.  We noticed how all multiples of five either ends in a five or a zero.  Then he walked while chanting, left foot only hitting the green papers, right foot only hitting the pink papers.  He especially enjoyed the path leading to a bed or crash pad of some sort.  Kind of like a sensory reward for counting all the way up to one hundred!

10’s: A song of course!  I’m singing it right now…..you can hear it obviously 😉

9’s: Okay, we haven’t started this one yet, but I know the trick to learning it.  Take a blank sheet of paper, write the number 9 at the top.  While keeping the ones and tens columns lined up, write the multiples of 9’s vertically.  Notice that the ones column starts at nine and counts down by one number while the tens column starts at zero (blank) and counts up by one number.  Why didn’t someone teach me this??  I had so much trouble learning these as a kid and this would have made so much sense!!  Of course, there’s always the “add ten then take away one”…..but that’s more math to just get me to nine more than I left off.  I much prefer the visual trick of ascending and descending numbers.  Not to mention it’s way cooler.

Still to come: 6’s, 7’s, 8’s…….still thinking……

Once he had comfortably learned to skip count a few numbers, I moved on to showing *why* he learned them.  Multiplication is just fast addition.  We showed it with blocks:

He immediately understood and pretty much felt like the most brilliant kid ever.  Mom breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Feel free to leave suggestions for those last three numbers in the comments!