I Was Raised by the Drill Sergeant Method
Here is how I learned my times tables, somewhere in a Singapore flat in the nineties: standing beside the dining table after dinner, reciting "seven times six is forty-two" while a parent held the assessment book and waited for mistakes. It worked, in the sense that I still know seven times six. It also worked in the sense that I associated maths with standing at attention until roughly JC.
So when my son hit P2 and multiplication arrived in his school bag, I had a decision to make: hand down the drill sergeant, or find another way. I went looking for another way — partly out of principle, mostly because my son is the kind of child who, when drilled, develops a sudden fascinating interest in the ceiling fan.
A year later he knows his tables, likes maths, and thinks Multiplication War is a treat. Nothing we did was clever or expensive. This is the playbook, in the order we actually used it.
First, Know What P2 Multiplication Actually Is
A quick orientation, because parental panic often comes from aiming at the wrong target. At P2, children typically work with the tables of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 — the full set up to 12 comes later, in P3. More important than the list is the idea: multiplication at this age is taught as repeated addition and equal groups. "3 × 4" means three groups of four things. The multiplication sentence is a shorthand for a picture.
That reframes the parent job completely. The job is not "make the child memorise forty facts". It is "make the child see equal groups everywhere, then let the facts settle on top of that seeing". Memorisation without the picture produces a child who knows 3 × 4 = 12 but cannot tell you why, blanks under pressure, and has nothing to rebuild from when memory slips. Picture first, facts second. Everything below follows that order.
Stage 1: Skip-Counting Songs (the Melody Does the Memorising)
Before any child multiplies, they skip-count: 2, 4, 6, 8... 5, 10, 15, 20... This is the on-ramp, and the cheapest trick in the book is to put it to music.
Find any skip-counting song playlist — there are plenty made for this exact purpose — or do what we did half the time and bolt the numbers onto tunes the child already owns. Skip-counting by 2 fits nicely into almost any nursery tune with a bit of squashing; the squashing is half the fun. One song per table, played in the car or sung while walking to the MRT, for a week or two per table.
Why it works so well: melody is a memory scaffold. The same child who cannot recite ten numbers in order can sing you an entire cartoon theme song with verses. Songs also remove the performance pressure — nobody is being tested during a singalong, so the reluctant child participates before their resistance wakes up.
One upgrade once a song is solid: pause-singing. You sing "five, ten, fifteen..." and stop; the child supplies "twenty!" Then stop in harder places. This converts passive singing into retrieval without anyone declaring that practice has begun — and retrieval, sneaked in or otherwise, is where the learning actually happens.
Stage 2: Arrays — the Egg Tray Is Your Textbook
Here is the single most useful object in P2 multiplication: the humble egg tray. A standard tray of thirty holds five rows of six. A tray of ten is two rows of five. Fill it with eggs, ping-pong balls, or those loose Lego heads that colonise every sofa, and you have an array — objects arranged in equal rows — which is the picture multiplication is made of.
What we did with the tray, ten minutes at a time:
- Build a fact. "Show me 3 × 4." He lays three rows of four. Count them — by rows, skip-counting: four, eight, twelve. The multiplication sentence gets written next to the tray, so symbol and picture wire together.
- Read a build. I lay out rows, he tells me the sentence. Then the killer question: "how do you know it's twelve without counting one by one?" The answer — "because four, eight, twelve" — is the whole P2 syllabus in one breath.
- Break a build. Lay out 4 × 5, then split the tray: "look, four fives is the same as two fives and two more fives." That's distributive thinking, years before anyone names it. It's also exactly how a P3 child will later work out 7 × 6 from 5 × 6 and 2 × 6.
Stage 3: The Commutative Shortcut — Half the Work, Announced Dramatically
Somewhere in the array stage, engineer the discovery: build 3 rows of 4, count twelve. Now rotate the tray a quarter turn. Suddenly it's 4 rows of 3. Count it — twelve. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. 3 × 4 and 4 × 3 are the same twelve, viewed from different sides of the table.
To an adult this is obvious. To a seven-year-old it is genuinely news — and it deserves to be announced like news, because of what it does to the workload. If your child knows 3 × 4, then 4 × 3 comes free. Every fact they learn buys its twin. The mountain of facts they were dreading is half the size it looks.
I made this a deliberate ceremony. We rotated the tray, he counted both ways, his eyebrows went up, and I said, "You've just found a cheat code. Every answer you learn, you get another one free." For a child who found the times-table chart intimidating, watching the mountain shrink by half in one afternoon did more for his morale than any pep talk. And morale, at P2, is the syllabus — a child who believes tables are conquerable will conquer them.
Stage 4: The Right Order — 2, 5 and 10 First, Then 3 and 4
Do not learn the tables in numerical order. Two, then three, then four is the road to a swamp, because 3 and 4 are the hard ones. The order that works with the grain:
- 10 first. Nearly free — the child can already count by tens, and the answers have a visible pattern. Instant confidence.
- 5 next. Strong pattern (ends in 5 or 0), strong skip-counting song, and it maps to real things: five fingers, five-dollar notes, clock minutes.
- 2 alongside. It's doubles, and children love doubles; most already half-know them from sharing things with a sibling ("two for you, two for me").
- Then 3, then 4 — the genuinely effortful ones — attacked only after the child has three easy victories banked and believes tables are learnable. And 4 has a lifeline: it's double the 2s. "4 × 6? Double 2 × 6. Twelve, doubled — twenty-four." Doubling is a trick P2 children adopt gleefully, because it feels like cheating and works every time.
Stage 5: Games — Where the Facts Get Fast
Understanding is built; now speed, and speed comes from retrieval practice, and retrieval practice is best disguised as a game. Two staples carried our whole year.
Multiplication War. Strip the picture cards from a deck. Split it. Both players flip a card at once; first to shout the product of the two cards wins the pair; most cards at the end wins. That's the entire game, and it is retrieval practice at a rate no worksheet approaches — plus the child gets to beat a parent, which no worksheet offers at any price. Tune it honestly: with aces as one and number cards only, early rounds stay within reach; play "your card times five" nights to target one table; and lose sometimes, narrowly and plausibly. A parent who wins every hand is running a drill with extra steps.
Buzz. Count around the family circle, but every multiple of the chosen table gets replaced with "buzz". Fives: "one, two, three, four, BUZZ, six..." Miss a buzz or buzz wrongly and the round restarts. Works at the dinner table, in queues, on walks; needs zero equipment; and quietly forces the child to anticipate multiples, which is skip-counting under pressure. When it gets too easy, run it backwards from fifty. When Grandma gets eliminated on twenty, you will hear about it for weeks.
On nights when nobody had the energy to be the games master, a short digital session filled the slot — the multiplication games on BrightBit were our usual, ten minutes and done. The test for any app is the same as for any game: is the child retrieving facts, or watching cartoons between questions? Retrieval or it doesn't count.
What "Fluency" Actually Means at P2 (and What It Doesn't)
Time for the expectation-setting section, because this is where drill sergeants are born.
Fluency at P2 does not mean instant recall of every fact, delivered under a stopwatch. That's a P3-and-beyond outcome, and even then it arrives unevenly. Fluency at P2 looks like this:
- The child knows what multiplication means and can draw or build any fact as equal groups.
- The 2s, 5s and 10s are quick — mostly remembered, not worked out.
- The 3s and 4s are reliable — the child can get there in a few seconds via skip-counting, doubling, or a known neighbour fact, without collapsing.
- Given a fact they've forgotten, they have a strategy, not a shrug.
So resist the stopwatch this year. Timed pressure applied before facts are secure teaches quick children they're superior and slower children that maths hates them — and the slower children are often simply children whose understanding is still consolidating. Speed grows out of security. It genuinely does arrive on its own: the fact retrieved successfully across many relaxed game nights becomes the fact that's simply there by P3.
The Whole Playbook on One Page
For the parent who scrolled to the end, the honest summary:
- Songs put skip-counting in the ear — one table at a time, car rides, pause-singing.
- Egg trays and Lego put the picture in the eyes — build facts, read facts, break facts apart.
- Rotate the tray and announce the great halving: 3 × 4 is 4 × 3, every fact buys its twin.
- Order: 10, 5, 2, then 3 and 4 — easy victories first, doubling as the lifeline for the 4s.
- War and Buzz make retrieval a family sport; lose narrowly and often.
- Fluency means strategies, not stopwatches. Speed is the harvest, not the seed.