Maya says thafl for instance, to help the children of Class 2 construct the '5 times table', she uses their hands. Each child counts how many fingers on one hand, and then how many on 2 hands, 3 hands (including that of the child near her), and so on. In this way she can build the table and gradually, through repeated exercises, understand and be able to recall what 5 times 7 is. In giving the child this practice, she uses different things of the same group size. For example, she uses toes, petals of flowers and other things that occur in fives. Maya says that she first gets children to prepare tables of 2,5 and 10, because children find these easy to do.
Her aim is to help each child to eventually be able to quickly recall any specific multiplication fact. For this purpose, she also does some of the following activities with them regularly.
1) Every day, before starting the day's topic, she sets aside a few minutes to ask the children 'multiplication facts'.
2) Every second or third day each child is given an assignment card, like the one below, to be filled up.
3) Sometimes the children are asked to recite the multiples of a given number.
4) Sometimes she plays the 'postman game' with them. In this game the children are given several cards. On one side of each card is written the first half of a multiplication fact, like 7 x 3 or 8 x 5, and on the other side are some numbers like 20, 2 1, 35, etc. Now, one child acts as the postman. She has with her some "letters", the addresses of which are 6 x 2, 7 x 3, .... She comes to the class and says, "7 times 3 has a letter. Who is 7 times 3?" The child who has the card 21 should come forward and say "I am '7 times 3 is 21'. Give me the letter." If the right child claims the letter, she gets one point in the game. The postman shall call out "the address" of each letter till all of them are exhausted. You can now think about what we have said so far, while doing the following exercises.