my ds has belatedly finally started learing the times tables. He is 7.8 and in the top "maths" group in his P3 class (equivalent of Y2 in England).
He has been desparate to learn the times tables for ages and has been being bored by the maths he has been doing at school (I have posted on previous threads fro advice as to whether we were being unreasonably pushy in expecting the school to be stretching him more).
As a result, we had started doing a wee bit of work with him at home - at his insitigation. We had been careful not to teach him by rote, athough we do have a times table chart up on the kitchen wall (and he is very proud of the fact that he knows 12x12! ). We made him work things out for himself - ie 4x3 was 4 groups of 3 that he needed to add together. I even added in "grouping" after a comment at school - ie 4 x 3 could also be seen as two grups of doubled up threes, ie 2 x 6. he was comofrtable doing thins like 4 x 5, 6 x 6 etc.
Having said that, now that he has started doing it "properly" at school, he seems to have gone backwards and totally lost the concept. His homework last night took a lot of effort for him to get right. Initially he was coming up with things like 6 x 5 = 28, 4 x 3 = 18.
It was all I could do to persuade him not to go into the kitchen to look up the table. Dh finally got him to work out using boxes of his wine tasting glasses and getting him to see that 5 x 6 was 30 etc(we'd love ds to tell his teacher how he worked it out, given that she has told the class that "God says that alcohol is bad and no-one should drink it" )
What can we do to support him in learning the times tables without undermining the school? How should we explaining it to him? is there a strange new technique that we are not aware of?