Why and How Toddlers Should Memorise the Times Tables: A Guide for Parents and Teachers

The times tables plays a crucial role in our children's journey towards that more inspired world view that mathematical understanding bestows. As parents, teachers and/or policy-makers, we need to appreciate how important it is for children to memorise their times tables efficiently. Only when we, as guardians of all our children's futures, make the efficient memorisation of the times tables a priority, will questions about how our children memorise their times tables become a matter for scrutiny, and when they memorise their times tables become a matter of urgency. In this book, Dr. Riazi-Farzad also explains why calculators do not replace the need for us to have rapid mental access to the times tables. Making a strong case for why most of the current methods for teaching the times-tables are highly inefficient, Dr Riazi Farzad offers an alternative (patent pending) method of introducing the times tables to children that will help them to, not only recall their times tables facts efficiently, but also provides a seamless transition to division and beyond. This book is essential reading for everyone concerned with mathematics education, including parents, grandparents, teachers, tutors, university lecturers and policy-makers. It explains one of the fundamental reasons why children fail to fall in love with mathematics (or not), leading to lost opportunities, not only in terms of wasted potential that could benefit society as well as their own academic and career achievement, but also in relation to their, and consequently everyone's, greater life fulfilment. Dr. Bijan Riazi-Farzad has been teaching science and mathematics since 1990. After studying asthma for his PhD in Pharmacology, he turned his attention to education and obtained a Masters degree in Psychology of Education in 2006. Since then, he has been involved in research at the Institute of Education, University of London, looking into factors that affect young people's perception of their school subjects, particularly Mathematics and Physics. He has two primary-aged children and lives in London, United Kingdom.