So by now, I think it’s pretty clear that I like trees. A lot. Turns out that my daughter, who is 7, is going through full on time table ‘fun’ at school at the moment. it made me think that time tables tend to be a grid of numbers and not much else, so visually pretty boring and hard to remember. I am, surprise surprise, a very visual learner, and I started wondering how we could represent a time table in a more meaningful way. I couldn’t help adding a few friendly forest animals to liven it all up.

How does this work?

You start by adding the core number to the bottom of the tree. You then add it to each ‘cherry’ throughout (so 3 at the bottom and in all the cherries for example). Each cherry is paired and each branch in a way shows you what adding all the cherries would look like (3 cherries equals 3 x 3). So by filling in this tree, kids can understand the build up, but also see the pattern of odds and evens, pairs etc…

This can be used as an activity sheet, and works with ALL time tables.

I’m researching other time table tricks (and have found some pretty fab ones!), which I hope to illustrate as well for a little math tricks compendium… I might also offer this as a free downloadable when I can figure out how!!