FREE RESOURCE: Whole-class incremental rehearsal for times tables
Incremental rehearsal is a powerful one-to-one intervention for students to learn times tables bit-by-bit. Why not apply its principles to design a whole-class intervention? The result is here to download.
Getting students to practise their times tables to fluency can be hard. Many strategies like chanting or worksheets don’t hit the mark for too many students because they introduce too many new facts at once and there is no procedure for bridging the gap from an error to successful retrieval of a fact.
These slides have been designed for teachers to lead their whole class in practising times tables using the principles of incremental rehearsal. Traditionally, incremental rehearsal is an intensive one-to-one flashcard intervention in which one new fact is introduced at a time. A session involves the new fact being retrieved by the student several times, each retrieval being spaced further and further apart by retrieval of facts that have been previously learned until a ratio of 9 learned facts to 1 new fact are being practised.
How does whole-class incremental rehearsal work?
Each lesson involves 3 parts:
Practising a strategy
Saying the new facts
Fluency practice
In the above Strategy slide, students are given two facts to derive using a taught strategy. Scaffolds are provided but faded out over subsequent lessons. Students then turn and talk to discuss how the strategy is applied. The teacher can then call on students to respond. Discussing strategies is not part of incremental rehearsal, but this step has been added to encourage connections between students’ conceptual understanding of these facts and the ability to know these facts implicitly without having to think hard.
This New Facts slide presents the problem and answer for all students to say as a whole: 8 times 4 is 32. 7 times 4 is 28. The focus has shifted from applying a strategy to direct recall.
This Fact Fluency slide is animated with each row appearing separately. At first, only two facts are practised, the same two facts from the previous slide. The teacher says the problem and the students say the answer in a back-and-forth manner. Next, the students practise 3 facts, then 4 facts and so on. The facts in red are the new facts from the previous slide. The facts in black were learned in previous lessons. An important way to differentiate instruction here is to call on individual students at the end of each row to demonstrate. Checking that weaker students are successful at the start, middle and end of the sequence ensures everyone is learning.
How do I implement it successfully?
These slides are designed to follow on from explicit instruction in strategies students use to derive multiplication facts, so teach the strategies first. The strategies referenced in this resource include:
Skip counting
Using fact families
Doubling
Adding groups
Subtracting groups
These slides are a useful bridge from acquisition to fluency, but fluency needs to be maintained. So, follow up with activities to maintain fluency. This might include timed practice or games. You can use the blue box in the right-hand corner to include notes about activities that students can engage with at different points in the sequence. I’ve added example notes about relevant activities in Times Tables Rock Stars at the end of each set, but you can and should add your own notes.
How can I adapt the resource?
The slides are editable, so if you use slightly different language to explain strategies or different visual supports, it’s easy to adapt the resources to better align with the instruction used in your context.
Download the resources here
And if your school is looking to upskill in Retrieval and Fluency in Maths, you can book me to run a full-day workshop. More info here.
