Playing With Nines

Here is a simple vid where two little boys learn about nines and multiplication using stuff they already know: addends and counting...

The older boy who BTW turns six today said upon review of the video..."I thought they were supposed to be hard."
"Really?"
"Yeah, but that was almost TOO easy."
"Yeah, too easy," chimes in the four year old...

Now it's just practice and more games and more play until the nines are part of their instant recall memory.

I was working with a 14 year old and discovered her multiplication was severely lacking and nines in particular were not there. This same lesson was used to similar effect: she found nines to be easy. I also showed her "one less make a ten."

In other words 3 x 9 is one less than three which is 2 and 3 needs seven to be ten so 27. 6 x 9 is one less than 6 which is 5 and six needs four to be ten so 54. OR you can just take 30 minus 3 or 60 minus 6...unless of course you suck at subtraction because they taught you to count backwards and you're 14 and still 100% dependent on fingers.



That day we also watched Multiplication Rock vids, which upon reflection is where he might have gotten the idea that nines were supposed to be hard...lol...and counted by threes and sixes which they are getting very good at, and talked a little about what numbers they heard that were the same on three (read 3, 6 and 9) multiplication tables.

Those two boys are never going to have the problems with math that I commonly make 40.00 an hour to "fix" with children who are 13 thru 18. Further by the time they are 7 or 8 there will be very little math that high school kids can do that they can't do.