Hi,
I want to recommend a resource I found that seems to work well so far for multiplication. It is called See and learn Multiplication By Heart: the No-Fail Method for Children and Adults by Lucie Cossette, www.multidifference.com. (You will be able to access an amazon.ca website from the author’s website.)
The author is a psychology grad who is now a statistician for Statistics Canada. Because her son had trouble learning his tables, she developed a method to help him and then took a leave from her job to publish her multisensory method. It is a sort of visualizing and verbalizing method for the tables, building from visual imagery. It’s hard to describe, but is relatively easy and pain free to do. My son has “got” the 3 times table after about a week of a 5-10 minutes here and there (including verbalizing his imagery for the 3 x table in bed as I was tucking him in.)
His first reaction was, oh so here’s another method that probably won’t work. He now thinks it’s cool.
JanL