School is out!  Kaia is officially a 3rd grader, and we are celebrating with doughnuts and a party!  But before I retire the curriculum for the summer, I wanted to tell you about Memorize in Minutes: The Times Tables.  I bought this after hearing good reviews from other homeschoolers.  Adding in art and stories to Kaia’s math lessons seemed right up her alley.

When I first got it and looked through the book, I was skeptical.  Each number is assigned a word, like 2 is “shoe” and 6 is “chicks”.  Then a story is developed for each equation using these words as clues to the final answer, in this case “elf”.  And when you think of “shoe” and “chicks” you remember “elf”.  It sounded good, but I really didn’t think Kaia would know her multiplication facts just from hearing a story.

I’m very happy to tell you that it worked wonderfully.  Kaia really enjoyed coloring the picture of the equation while I told the story.  She would repeat the equation a few times and that was that.  We would do a new multiplication fact 2-3 times a week and review them once a week.  The book doesn’t cover multiplying by 0, 1, or 10 because those are pretty easy facts to memorize.  It also doesn’t repeat facts.  For example, once you learn 4 x 7 you don’t do 7 x 4. You learn as you go along that they are interchangeable .

When we finished, she taped them up on the wall in what she calls her “shrine to math”.

Working on the shrine

(The rainbow circle in the middle of the shrine is Robinsunne’s Multiplication Clock, a beautiful way of looking at the multiplication table)

She may still take a minute to think about the facts before giving the answer, but she knows the answer.  I think we’ll play lots of math games over the summer to help solidify the knowledge, but overall, I’m very impressed with the results!