Times tables games, all the way to 20

Tables are one of the few things in school maths that genuinely respond to repetition. Understanding is not the problem - almost every child understands that 6 times 4 means four sixes. The problem is retrieval speed, and retrieval speed only improves through frequent short practice. Ten minutes daily will do more in a fortnight than two hours on a Sunday will do in a month.

Start untimed, always

The timer is the last thing to switch on, not the first. A clock measures how fast a fact comes back, and there is nothing to measure until the fact is actually there. Run the untimed mode until your child answers without a visible pause. Then add sixty seconds and let them try to beat their own count.

Used too early, a timer teaches a child that they are slow at maths, which is a belief far harder to undo than any table.

Drill the one table they miss

Working through 2 to 20 in order feels productive and mostly is not. Most of that time is spent on the 2s, 5s and 10s, which your child already knows. Use the single-table option instead. When the end screen tells you the table of 7 is where the misses are, do the table of 7 tomorrow.

There are fewer facts than it looks

The tables to 12 contain 121 facts, which sounds enormous to a nine-year- old. It is not really 121. The 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s come almost free. Because 6 × 7 and 7 × 6 are the same fact, half of what remains is a duplicate. What is genuinely left is about 36 facts, and the hard core of those is roughly a dozen: 6×7, 6×8, 7×8, 7×9, 8×9 and their partners.

Telling a child that there are twelve hard ones and they already know everything else changes the size of the task in their head. That alone is worth doing before any practice starts.

The tricks worth teaching

For the 9 times table, the two digits of every answer add up to 9, and the tens digit is one less than the number being multiplied: 9 × 7 = 63, and 6 is one less than 7. For 11 up to 11 × 9, simply repeat the digit. For 19, take twenty lots and subtract one lot - 19 × 6 is 120 minus 6. Children who are frightened of the big tables usually stop being frightened the moment somebody shows them that 19 is just 20 with one taken off.

What the tables look like class by class

In Class 2 the tables of 2, 5 and 10 are built through skip counting, and NCERT builds 4, 6, 7 and 8 by adding two tables together rather than by memorising them. In Class 3 the × symbol appears for the first time and the tables to 10 are consolidated, with no product above 100. Class 4 is where tables need to become automatic, because column multiplication and division with remainders both arrive and neither works if the facts are still being calculated. By Class 5 and 6, schools commonly extend to 20, and slow recall starts costing marks in long division and fractions.

Where a game stops helping

If your child is practising daily and the same facts keep going missing, the issue is usually not effort. It can be that they have never been shown multiplication as an array or as repeated addition, so the facts have nothing to hang on. It can be a much older gap. A game cannot find that. A teacher watching them work for twenty minutes usually can.