Remember Anything

After the experience I had teaching our phone number to my son, my wife commented that she had seen several products that claimed to use mnemonics to teach the multiplication tables to kids. Did I think we should get one?

At first I thought, “I could probably develop something myself.”  But, I had her send me some links.

One of the links was to a company named Trigger Memory Systems.  They make a product called “Times Tales.“  A set of stories that associate the combination of numbers 6 through 9 to their answers.

Why only 6 through 9?  Well, think about it.  We don’t want to teach multiplication facts without the child understanding what they are doing.

Most kids can do the sets 0 through 5 pretty quickly doing addition if they have to.  In fact, when I teach my kids multiplication, that’s exactly how I teach it.  However, using addition gets to be problematic once you get past six.  Since they already understand that we are just adding we can use mnemonics to help them learn the facts faster.  Mnemonics isn’t a substitution for understanding.  It’s a way of remembering better what you already understand.

I looked at the price and thought to myself, “hey, I can’t come up with something on my own for this price and even if it doesn’t work, it is a relatively small price to pay to see if it works.”  So, we bought the package.

How it works
It arrived a few days later.  It came with very clear instructions which we read through.  Basically, it involves teaching a set of stories to your children and moving from the stories to the multiplication facts.  My wife spent an hour with our 7 and 11 year old boys and they basically had the facts down.  (Yes, our 7 year old understands multiplication).  I came home and quized them that evening.  They were answering problems they would completely space on the day before in about 30 seconds.  I spent the next couple days quizing them randomly on multiplication facts I knew were particularly difficult for them and by the end of the week they were answering them immediately.  In some cases, faster than I could.  (I’m pretty good at math, I’m just not very quick.)

Works
You may look at the picture on the left and wondering what a story about two trees producing apples could possibly have anything to do with multiplication. The story really could have been about anything, so long as it could be related back to the multiplication fact 9 x 9. In the TimesTales  system, a treehouse represents the number 9. So, when I ask my children what 9 x 9 is, they remember the story about the two tree houses having 8 apples and 1 apple and reply to me 81. And because remembering stories uses a different part of the brain, and is therefore easier for most people than remembering the times tables, children, and adults, can remember these facts easier than they can
remember the multiplication facts.

Click here now to order your copy!

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