The fifth grade teacher shook her head and said to the two student teachers in her room, “I hate it when this happens. It’s definitely not my responsibility. The half of my fifth grade students don’t know the multiplication tables. Now we are about to do two-digit multiplications and divisions. Why did they not learn the basic multiplication facts in their second, third, and fourth grades?”
It seems the fifth grade teacher has lost patience with these students. It certainly is tough. If students don’t even have the basic math skills, how can we expect them to do well on the upcoming assessment tests, meeting up on the current fifth grade level? While we don’t know who should be responsible for this, we realize that many students in this group were newly transferred from the outside schools. Since they are here, we’d better take good care of them. If we don’t help them, they are going to stagnate and make no progress.
Is the teacher in trouble?
Not really. These two student teachers and I came up with a plan. We prepared a cheat sheet of multiplication tables for students to use so that these students who were ignorant of the multiplication facts could still participate in the new learning in class using the cheat sheet. We then developed a plan to patch up what they have missed.
We decided to spend 20-30 minutes each day for a week to help these students master the multiplication tables. We explained the basic notion about multiplication using manipulatives, in that they understood that 3×4 meant 3 groups of 4 and became ready to memorize the facts. On Day One, we focused on 0’s, 1’s, 2’s and 10’s facts. That was easy. They also learned that counting by 2’s will yield the same results as the 2’s facts. On Day 2, we did a quick review first, and then focused on 3’s, 4’s, and 5’s facts. They learned that counting by 5’s was very easy, while counting by 4’s would be similar to skipping every other number in counting by 2’s. However, they needed to spend a little more time to memorize 3’s facts and that was not painful. On Day 3, we reviewed facts from 0’s to 5’s, and then we added 6’s and 7’s facts. On Day 4, we were able to complete all the facts between 0’s through 10’s. On Day 5, all of them were able to memorize all the multiplication facts between 0’s and 10’s. We stepped up the challenges by adding 11’s and 12’s facts in the table.
The teacher was now calm, and all students were ready to move on after only one short week’s remedial training.
