Moving from skip counting to basic facts

The children were very good at counting in fives. However none of them used basic facts the first time.

They then looked at how they could work this out using 10s. 

They struggled at first to work out how many groups of ten there would be. The either used the same number 10x6=60 or continued to skip count. 

It took a bit of practice but they started to get this idea. They talked about the number of groups being halved. 

Then they did a problems like 7 lots of 5 they then made 3 groups of ten and one group of five. They repeated this with 3s making groups of 6. Then 4s. 

This is a great strategy that I don't use as much as I could. I have been aiming to get them to using timetables that I have not pushed the way they could make different groups. I think this partitional thinking is key to developing a wider sense of how to solve addition problems. The problem that we use get different types of thinking.

Later Jo talked about moving children into solid stage 5 and giving them the basic facts knowledge they need for stage 6.

When we are teaching children multiplication when need to help children generalise by knowing families of facts 1x17 is the same as 17x1=. Then they can work out the easiest ones first 1x, 10x then we start to use the knowledge we have to find unknown facts.