A little every day beats an hour on Sunday
The Professor's Fact Factory
Number facts are the one part of maths where drilling genuinely works — not because repetition is clever, but because a child who has to work out 7 × 8 has no attention left for the actual problem it appeared in.
How to use it
- Five to ten minutes. One level is about that. Longer stops helping.
- Every day beats every weekend. Facts move into memory through frequency, not through hours, and a daily five minutes beats a Sunday hour by a wide margin.
- Speed comes last. Accuracy first, then it gets quicker on its own. Pushing for speed before a fact is known just teaches guessing.
- Go back a level when it stops being fun. The point is fluency, and fluency is built on things that already feel easy.
The four tracks
120 levels in total, and nothing to sign up for.
Away from a screen
Every one of these has a printable sheet with its answer key, and the card games drill the same facts with a deck of cards and no screen at all. Multiplication War in particular is a whole times-table session that a child will ask to play again.