As many teachers will know, it is now a Year 4 expectation that children will know all of their times tables. This is obviously useful throughout the maths curriculum but I am not going to debate whether children should or shouldn’t learn them all. This post is to share a fantastic resource that Jo Payne (www.mrspteach.com) pointed me towards earlier this year.
Times Table Rockstars (www.ttrockstars.com) is an online tool that tests children on times tables. That’s it. It isn’t fancy and it doesn’t wrap them up in racing/football/skiing games or whatever like some tools might do, it just shows a multiplication/division question and the children answer it. Quickly.
Let’s start from the beginning. You get a four-week free trial (good) and you can upload your whole school using a csv file (great). I created accounts for my whole school in minutes. Every ICT leader must surely have a csv file with all pupils on as this is the default way of creating logins for so many tools these days. If not, get one from your MIS system (ask the lovely people in the office). You can then put children into classes or bands and you’re away. We decided not to set them up in classes but to call our classes 2x, 3x, 2/5/10x etc after the different times table groupings. The children still have weekly tests in class and if they pass, they move to a different band. You can assign times tables to a particular band too. So the 2/5/10x band are only given 2/5/10x table questions. Makes sense, right?
Once logged in, the children are given a rock star and can choose from some bizarre rock star names. If they don’t like them, they pick again and again and again… They can also choose hair, eyes and other avatar essentials. Then the fun starts…
They can either go into one of the training modes or they can go into the rock festivals. These arenas (named after different venues such as Glastonbury or Wembley) are where the children can battle against each other. Often, I will have a whole class of children trying to get into the same arena so they can all play against each other. As they answer questions correctly, they earn coins. These coins can be used to adapt their avatar and also show in the leaderboards (turn these off if you want to). Each game only lasts 60 seconds.
There is also a new feature where children can challenge a friend. So one will play a game and send the time to their friend, when they log in, they will see the challenge and be able to see a “ghost” of their friend’s achievements and try and beat it. Friendly competition is a good thing.
So, how have we used it? I would say we have 2/3 times a week where the children will have 10 minutes on Rockstars. We use chromebooks which load in seconds so we can be up and running, playing a game in under a minute. The children will then play at least 5 rounds, answering 50+ questions in minutes.
For each child, it shows a times table grid. As they get the answers right, the squares go green so I know which children need targeting in which areas. I still teach times tables and I still practise in the normal ways, but this gives the children an additional resource to use too. They even choose to go on this when given free time.
The children in my class have made massive progress in their times table knowledge and this is the culmination of lots of different approaches but TTRockstars has definitely helped. It also has a range of paper-based times table tests too.
How much does it cost? £50 per year for the whole school. An absolute bargain.
