Learn the times tables fast: the ten facts that take real work

Why does more drilling not work?

Random drilling of the whole grid fails because most of that practice time lands on facts your child already owns. Three things go wrong with it.

Drilling treats the grid as a hundred unrelated items when most of it is a handful of patterns. It hides which facts are weak, so the easy ones come round again and again while the five or six that cost real time are never pulled out alone. And long sessions build dread: twenty minutes of flashcards on a school night teaches a child that multiplication is a punishment.

The fix is the opposite of more: shrink the list, teach the tables in an order where each one leans on the one before, and stop after ten minutes.

How many facts does my child really have to learn?

A child has to memorize only ten multiplication facts in the 1–10 grid: 3×4, 3×6, 3×7, 3×8, 4×6, 4×7, 4×8, 6×7, 6×8 and 7×8. Written out, the grid looks like 100 separate facts, which is why it frightens everybody at the kitchen table. Take it apart and nearly all of it turns out to be rules.

• Order does not matter. 7×6 and 6×7 are one fact learned once. The US Common Core standards teach that move in grade 3: if 6 × 4 = 24 is known, then 4 × 6 = 24 is also known. Counting each pair once turns 100 written facts into 55 pairs.
• The 1s are a rule. Drop every pair containing 1 and 45 are left.
• The 10s are place value. Write the number, add a zero. Drop every pair containing 10: 36 left.
• The 2s are doubles, which most children own before they meet multiplication. Drop them: 28 left.
• The 5s are half of the 10s, or the clock face. Drop them: 21 left.

Twenty-one pairs remain, and every one of them is built from 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9. Teach the 9s as ten groups minus one group, and the six pairs containing a 9 go too, leaving 15. Teach the five squares, 3×3=9, 4×4=16, 6×6=36, 7×7=49 and 8×8=64, as their own small set, and ten facts are left:

3×4=12 · 3×6=18 · 3×7=21 · 3×8=24 · 4×6=24 · 4×7=28 · 4×8=32 · 6×7=42 · 6×8=48 · 7×8=56

That is the whole difficulty, and it clusters around 6, 7 and 8. Counts of 55 or 38 facts stop at an earlier step: this one also drops the 9s and the squares, which follow a rule. Ten facts fit on a sticky note on the fridge, and a hundred do not.

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The order to learn the tables in

Teach the tables in the order 2, 10, 5, 4, 3, 9, 6, 8, 7, because each table in that order is built out of one your child already has.

1. 2s: doubling. Most children arrive with this.
2. 10s: add a zero. 10×7 = 70.
3. 5s: half of the 10s. 5×7 is half of 70, so 35.
4. 4s: double the 2s, which is doubling twice. 4×7: 7 → 14 → 28.
5. 3s: double, then add one more group. 3×7 = 14 + 7 = 21.
6. 9s: ten groups minus one group. 9×7 = 70 − 7 = 63.
7. 6s: the 5s plus one more group. 6×7 = 35 + 7 = 42.
8. 8s: double the 4s, which is doubling three times. 8×6: 6 → 12 → 24 → 48.
9. 7s: by this point the only new fact in the 7s is 7×7 = 49.

The 7s, the table every family dreads, arrive nearly empty when they come last: every fact except 7×7 was covered by an earlier table. The 7s are only hard when they come first.

What does a ten-minute routine look like?

A ten-minute routine is four short blocks in the same order every day: warm-up, the weak five, mixed recall, then the same facts backwards. Set a timer and obey it: stopping while it still feels easy is what makes your child willing to sit down again tomorrow.

1. Minutes 1–2, warm-up. Say this week's table out loud, forwards, then backwards. Chanting makes the numbers familiar; recall comes from the later blocks.
2. Minutes 3–5, the weak five. Five facts on cards, the same five all week, the ones that came out slow yesterday. Say the answer, turn the card, move on. No scoring.
3. Minutes 6–8, mixed recall. Facts out of order, from every table learned so far. This block builds fluency, and everybody skips it. A short round on a times tables practice game does it without anyone having to hold cards.
4. Minutes 9–10, backwards. Ask "six times what is 42?" instead of "what is 6×7?". Missing-factor questions are division in disguise, and the fastest way to catch a half-learned fact. A round of missing factor practice fills this block.

Two blocks in that routine follow the evidence. The What Works Clearinghouse practice guide Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics recommends timed activities of one to five minutes, added once a child has worked on the idea over several lessons, never as the way the idea is introduced. Coming back to a table days after it was taught is what the companion guide Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning calls spacing learning over time, and that delayed re-exposure is what makes a fact stay.

Once a week, swap the mixed-recall block for paper: a multiplication worksheet for 3rd graders comes with an answer key and leaves a written record of which facts are still slow.

Free printable worksheetMultiplication — 3rd GradersWorksheet · PDF

One trick per table

One pattern per table does most of the work: doubling for the 2s, halving the 10s for the 5s, ten groups minus one for the 9s. A child who sees the pattern needs far fewer repetitions to keep the fact.

The 9s reward a minute on their own: from 9×1 to 9×10 the tens digit is one less than the number you multiplied by, and the two digits add to 9. So 9×7 starts with 6, and 6 plus 3 is 9: 63.

The "next to a square" rule rescues the worst pair in the grid. If 7×7 = 49 is solid, then 7×8 is 49 + 7 = 56, and 6×7 is 36 + 6 = 42, so two of the ten hard facts come out of one square. More shortcuts of that shape are in mental math tricks that work.

How do I tell recall from fast counting?

Recall arrives whole, in about three seconds, with nothing visible in between, while counting shows up as a delay, a whisper or a finger. Speed alone is not the test. A child who counts up in sixes fast is still counting, and counting collapses as soon as a second step is added. Four signs that a fact is being counted:

• The answer takes longer for bigger numbers in the same table.
• Your child recites the table under their breath before answering.
• Fingers, taps or eye movements appear.
• 6×7 comes out fine but 7×6 needs a restart. A recalled fact works in either order.

England's statutory multiplication tables check gives Year 4 pupils 6 seconds to answer each of 25 questions, according to the Department for Education administration guidance. Six seconds is generous for recall and tight for counting.

MathIt's own numbers point the same way. In the MathIt times tables game (facts from 1 to 12), 407 players answered 8,568 questions between July 19 and September 16, 2026. They got 91.7% right on the first try, and the median session ran at 6.3 seconds per question, almost exactly the pace the English check allows. The game adapts its difficulty to each player, and app users are not a sample of all children, so treat the figure as an illustration.

Test in mixed order, never down a table, and include the reverse direction. Asking whether 48 is a multiple of 6, or of 8, checks the same knowledge from a third angle, and a round of multiples practice is a quick way to do it.

The four-week plan

Four weeks at ten minutes a day is about four and a half hours of practice, which is a realistic budget for the 1–10 grid as long as the order 2, 10, 5, 4, 3, 9, 6, 8, 7 is kept.

If a week's check is not clean, run that week again rather than pushing on. A shaky 4s table makes the 8s twice as hard, because the 8s are built on them.

When the 1–10 grid is fluent, the 11s and 12s take a few days more. For 11×1 to 11×9 the digit doubles: 11×7 = 77. For the 12s, split into a 10 and a 2: 12×7 = 70 + 14 = 84. If you would rather a screen ran the mixed-recall block, the multiplication tables game and the times tables drill both open without a sign-up.