Teaching Times Tables using Concrete Resources

Hi, I'm Rebecca. And in this film we're going to look at how to use concrete resources to help children learn and understand times tables. This is really important. If we move children on too quickly to memorising multiplication facts, they can lack conceptual understanding and then this will mean they'll struggle later on. So let's have a look at a problem. How many groups of two are there in 24? You want pupils to be using something like this sort of resource where they've first got to identify that it represents two. Then they can use repeated addition to keep adding until they have 24 and they will see that 12 times 2 is 24. You can also use a bead string and count in twos along. And you can challenge children to say, well, how many more will you need to get to 24? Or do you need more or less beads? You could also ask pupils to count in pairs of numbers until they have 12 pairs. With this problem, pupils will see that there's actually multiple solutions. So how many ways can I make the total 36 using multiplication. And using these actual specific resources would mean they have to think very carefully. So for this one that represents the number 2, they will realise that they need 18 of them. So 18 times 2 is 36. For this one, the number 4, they would need 9. 9 times 4 is 36. With this one they would need 4 again, 4 times 9 is 36. And with this one, 6 times 6 is 36. And that will help them to make links and to see common multiples. Money is another great tool for teaching multiplication. Here, how many 10 pence piece coins make 50p? They can actually physically use 10ps to count out and get to the 50p to answer the question, always asking them to write the multiplication sentence that goes with it. So for this one, 10 times 5 is 50. So there you go. There's some easy ways to teach multiplication, ensuring that children can gain conceptual understanding.