The 6 Multiplication Facts Almost Every Kid Gets Stuck On
The same six, every year
Every fall I watch a new class hit multiplication, and every fall the same thing happens. Most of the table comes fairly easily. The twos, the fives, the tens, the nines with the finger trick. Then they smack into a small cluster of facts that just will not stick, and it's almost always the same facts. If you've watched your own kid sail through most of the times tables and then jam up on a stubborn few, you're seeing the same pattern I do. These are the hardest multiplication facts, and there are only about six of them that cause most of the pain.
The good news buried in that is huge. Your child is not bad at multiplication. They are stuck on six facts. Six is a very short list. You can attack six specific facts in a way you can never attack "the whole times tables."
Why these six and not others
There's a real reason certain facts fight back. The easy ones have patterns a kid can lean on. Anything times ten just adds a zero. Fives march in a rhythm every kid can hear. Nines have that trick where the digits add to nine. Twos are just doubling.
The hard facts have none of that. They sit in the middle of the table, the numbers are big enough to feel intimidating, and there's no obvious shortcut. There's also nothing tying them to daily life the way five and ten show up on clocks and money. So the brain has no hook to hang them on, and a fact with no hook is a fact that keeps slipping. The six troublemakers below are almost all clustered in that middle, and once you see the list you'll recognize them.
The list
Here are the six that trip up the most kids, in rough order of how often I see them cause tears:
- 6 x 7 = 42
- 7 x 8 = 56
- 6 x 8 = 48
- 7 x 9 = 63
- 6 x 9 = 54 (though the nine trick rescues this one)
- 8 x 6 = 48 (same fact as 6 x 8, but kids don't always realize that)
That last point matters more than it looks. A lot of kids treat 6 x 8 and 8 x 6 as two separate mountains to climb. They're the same fact. The commutative property, that a times b equals b times a, cuts the real workload almost in half. Teach a kid that once, out loud, and their private list of scary facts shrinks on the spot.
A trick for each one
Slogans don't help. Specific handles do. Here's what I actually use.
7 x 8 = 56. This is the famous one, and it has the best mnemonic in all of arithmetic. Say it as "five, six, seven, eight." That's 56 = 7 x 8. The answer and the problem are just the digits 5, 6, 7, 8 in a row. Kids love this one because it feels like cheating.
6 x 7 = 42. Anchor it to a fact they already own. Six sevens is one more seven than five sevens. Five sevens is 35, an easy fives fact, and 35 plus 7 is 42. Building the hard fact off a known one turns a blank into a two-second calculation, and the calculation fades into memory with reps.
6 x 8 = 48. Doubling ladder. Kids can usually do 3 x 8 = 24. Six eights is just double that, 48. Same for 8 x 6, because it's the same fact.
7 x 9 = 63 and 6 x 9 = 54. The nine trick handles both. For any single digit times nine, hold up ten fingers, fold down the finger matching the other number, and the fingers left of the fold are the tens and the fingers right are the ones. For 7 x 9, fold the seventh finger. Six to the left, three to the right. 63. It feels like magic and it always works.
How to practice them so they stick
Don't run your kid through all forty-something facts to hit these six. That's the mistake that makes kids hate math. Pull the stubborn facts out and give them their own tiny, focused sessions.
Four or five minutes is plenty. Work the six problem facts plus a couple of easy ones mixed in, so the child gets some wins and doesn't feel buried. Do it across several days instead of one long grind, because facts practiced in short spaced bursts stick far better than facts crammed in a marathon. And keep it retrieval, not rereading. The child should be pulling the answer out of their head, not watching you point at a chart.
This is where a good tool earns its keep, because it can quietly serve up the exact six facts a kid keeps missing instead of wasting reps on the ones they already own. That's the whole idea behind how we built the practice in Math Prizes, targeting the stuck facts rather than grinding the full table. But you can do the same thing with index cards and a marker. The tool is optional. The targeting is not.
The part that changes everything
The reframe I want you to walk away with is this. Your child does not have a multiplication problem. They have six facts. Name them, use the specific handle for each, practice them in short bursts, and watch the list get shorter. When a kid realizes the terrifying wall was really just six bricks, the fear drains out of it fast. And a kid who isn't scared of the facts learns them in a fraction of the time a scared kid ever will.