Learning Our Times Tables With Counting On Gloves

If there's one thing designed to strike fear into my heart it is finding out one of my children has to learn yet another set of times tables. Yes I know they are important and it's now a target for most schools that children should know all of them by year 6 but it's the worry of how to encourage and inspire children to learn these vital sums.

Repeating them by rote can be effective but, dare I say it, slightly dull and whilst they love singing along to Percy Parker's times tables songs it doesn't really give them a deeper understanding of how it all works - and it also means I get the wretched tunes stuck in my head for days after!

So I was really interested when I found out about Counting On Gloves - an innovative new way to encourage kids to learn their tables. Counting On Gloves use the most simple of mathematical tools to teach times tables - your fingers. There's a different set of gloves for each table from 1-10 with the answer to the sum matching the corresponding finger on your hand.  You can then play a range of games with them to begin learning.

We decided to try them out for the 3 times table and chose red gloves (there's a whole range of colours). Both my children were really excited to try them out and we began by having a 'quick fire' game where I asked the question and they used to gloves to give me the answer as quickly as possible.

As both children wanted to have a go we then had a competition when they had one glove each and we saw who could get the most right!

The Counting On Gloves come with a range of different games ideas that you can use the gloves for and of course you can have fun creating your own. Both of my children really enjoyed using the gloves and I thought that they worked well for adding an extra dimension to learning times tables. They were far more engaging than yet another round of repetition and my daughter actually asked to practice her tables the other day which was a first!

To find out more about these great gloves you can visit the Counting On Gloves website for information of have a chat to them on their Facebook or Twitter pages.

Happy Counting!