great post! My little guy is a very visual learner and wants SO badly to learn the multiplication tables but just can not memorize things (one of the really cool parts that we liked about his old montessori school was with their math, the kids learned the why behind the math and didn't just memorize)....but I am have a doozy of a time trying to come up with a way to help him learn them...thanks for the great post and links!

I hate to endorse one product over another since there are so many cool computer games for teaching math facts. I'm sure there will be one your little guy likes. Some are slow, some are fast, some are sweet, and some have explosions. There's something for everyone, and it seems like there's hundreds of them on the internet.

When we got really serious with DS who has difficulty memorizing due to his LDs, we did Timez attack because it is timed and demanding. It's free (as long as you don't buy the upgrade which is just more graphics, not different content). We have had good success with that.

We found a "mutiplication war" card game and Timez Attack. Both are working well for my dd. The card game in particular is good because my dd freaks out at the slightest bit of frustration. I just handed her the answer card to look at if she needed to and it worked great. Each player lays down a card with an equation on it. They say the answer to the equation and the player with the higher value takes both cards. The player with the most cards at the end of the game wins.

Thanks Dottie for the cool book idea - Times the Fun Way book - we ordered this after I saw your post and it came in the mail today....most of the lessons are really cool and I can see how they can help a child visualize that particular math fact. My son was SUPER excited to see the book because he has been dying to learn his tables and has a horrible time with memorization. I feel really silly but had never been shown the way you can do 9's times tables on your fingers - the book was easy to understand and is well written - he already learned the 4x4 lesson (you have to be 16 to drive a 4x4) and thinks it's cool that he can finally keep that in his memory :-) Thanks!

Hmm...I now know of two ways to do multiplication using fingers, and I'm not sure which one you are talking about. There is a cool book called Fingermath that I picked up at the library book sale and got addicted to for a while, and I like its methods. Then there is the stupid thing that my DS6 learned at school (I think...he may have made it up himself) that is really keeping him from just memorizing his multiplication tables. He counts up from the last one that he knows, basically. And when I try to free him from that, because I know he could simply memorize the tables in a day if he made up his mind, and he knows half of them already, he freaks out about it. Arrgh!