If your daughter has a hard time memorizing math facts, don't worry-- as others have said, it doesn't have much to do with her general math ability. That said, math facts are necessary good to learn at some point, to aid in fluency and allow proper focus on higher-level concepts when working problems. In addition, learning the facts may help in advocacy, as it removes a potential objection by the school to advancement. Maybe your daughter just hasn't had a method of learning math facts that clicked with her, or she might just need a little more time and practice.

I know that Timez Attack is used by some parents, whose children find it fun. We used IXL once upon a time, and something about the practice tasks there really clicked, to the point that my son was able to get the whole set of multiplication facts memorized after a few sessions (and normally he hates drill of any sort).

Some searching turned up these links, which may help:
http://letsplaymath.net/tag/times-table-series/

http://www.bigbrainz.com
http://mathrider.com
http://ixl.com
http://xtramath.org
http://www.mathblaster.com/

One technique that may work for your daughter is to give her strategies for (re)constructing the facts. Once she learns her twos table, she can construct the fours as long as she can add in her head, etc. I believe that that first link above has some strategies in it. Those might work well because they can increase confidence-- even if your daughter can't remember a fact, if she has a way or two to reconstruct it she won't be at a loss, just will take a bit more time to come up with the answer. In addition, if the reconstruction takes more time than simply memorizing the answer, over time she will simply start to remember to minimize the work; it will probably be automatic and relatively painless.


Striving to increase my rate of flow, and fight forum gloopiness. sick