Multiplication facts
There are a hundred products up to ten times ten. How do you get from counting equal groups to simply knowing them?
Where you are 4 inside
What this area is about
Multiplication starts as counting equal groups. This area turns that counting into fluency with every product of two whole numbers from 0 to 10. No fact is learned alone: each new one is built from facts already known, and the commutative property lets every fact count in both orders.
How these fit together
The starting facts. Facts for two, five and ten come straight out of skip counts the child already says.
Facts built from known ones. Facts for three, four and six use the distributive property: a three fact is a two fact and one more group. Facts for seven, eight and nine build the last six facts from known ones, for example a nine fact is a ten fact take away one group.
The table as a whole. Patterns in the multiplication table explains why rows, columns and the diagonal repeat: mirror cells across the diagonal, square numbers, and where the odd products sit.
A path through it
Twos, fives and tens first, then threes, fours and sixes, then sevens, eights and nines. The patterns lesson comes last: only the first block is needed to start it, but it reads the whole table at once.
Finish here and you are ready for division facts, multi-digit multiplication, powers such as 3^4 and the order of operations.