The Problem with Memorizing Multiplication Facts: Number Sense

 When I first started teaching, my mentor teacher pulled out a sticker chart and showed me how she taught her students math facts.  Each week, on Fridays, she would set a timer for five minutes, ask the kids to put their pencils in the air and blast off to completing 100 problems.

If students reached 90 percent or high, then they moved on to the next set of multiplication facts.  Most of my kids memorized their facts.  The problem with this?  I am not sure I taught them enough number sense to go along with it.  

Sure, my third graders and I acted out multiplication problems and drew them.  We played games and cut out arrays, but I am not sure why I felt the need to place the timed test in front of them.  I wish I had got out counters more and played with the manipulatives.  I definitely did this when introducing division, but why didn't I do it more my first years when I was introducing multiplication?

Memorizing facts isn't enough to get them a mathematical understanding.  My kids needed to touch objects, build arrays, decompose arrays and observe how multiplication sentences can be decomposed and composed again.  If I had understood the distributive property more myself, I would have been better at educating my kids early on in my teaching career. 

Today, I definitely have manipulatives out and at the ready.  They are not in a closet collecting dust with my old worksheets from ten years ago.  They are in a place my kids can access and do access on a daily basis.  And I teach hard things.  My 3rd and fourth graders are studying volume, graphing ideas on a coordinate plane, completing algebraic equations and all the time they are touching manipulatives, exploring logical thinking and problem solving, trying new ideas out and sometimes failing.

I need to keep finding questions for my kids to explore to ignite their curiosity.  Finding the right open ended, manipulative friendly problem can be tricky when you have multiple learning styles and kids with various needs.  I continue to work on it. I am creating these and finding them and soon I will place them on TPT for others to use if they want.  

Cheers.  Bust out those manipulatives!!!