Times Table Tower
Build the tower one times table at a time.
For grown-ups
- How long: 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
- When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
- Not timed: thinking time is the point of a book. Let silences run.
- Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.
What this practises
Multiplication facts to 10 × 10, and the division facts that go with them.
Facts are ordered by how hard they actually are, not by table. The identities and the twos, fives and tens come first; the awkward middle of the grid (six sevens, seven eights) comes last. Going 2s, 3s, 4s in order front-loads the wrong difficulty. Each block ends with the matching division fact.
- The underlying idea
- Multiplicative structure, ordered by real difficulty rather than by table.
- Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics
- 3rd grade Unit 1: Introducing Multiplication · 3rd grade Unit 4: Relating Multiplication to Division
- Sources
- Illustrative Mathematics / Kendall Hunt (2024) · Codding et al. (2011) · Fyfe et al. (2014) · Fuchs et al. (2012) all references →
Related measured skills: ARF · Multiplication facts, ALPACA · Elementary operations. What this means