The Year 4 times tables check, minus the panic

If your child is in Year 4, you'll have heard the phrase "times tables check" by now, probably said in a slightly tense voice at the school gate. The official name is the Multiplication Tables Check, or MTC. It happens in June, it's on a computer, and there's a fair amount of needless worry attached to it.

Here's the calm version.

What it actually is

It's 25 questions. Each one is a single multiplication fact, anything from 2 x 2 up to 12 x 12. Your child sees the question, types the answer, and has six seconds before it moves on. The whole thing takes about five minutes.

There's no pass mark in the way you might think. The school sees the scores, the government collects them, and that's roughly it. No child is held back and no door slams shut at age nine. It's a snapshot, nothing more.

The six-second limit is the part that worries kids, and honestly it's the part worth preparing for. It isn't testing whether your child can work out 7 x 8. It's testing whether they just know it, instantly, the way they know their own name.

The bit that helps

Recall, not working out. That's the whole game.

A child who counts up in sevens on their fingers will run out of time even though they're perfectly capable. A child who has simply heard "seven eights are fifty-six" five hundred times will type 56 without thinking. The aim of any practice is to move facts from "I can figure it out" to "I just know it".

The good news is that most of the tables are easier than they look once you take out the ones kids already have. The 2s, 5s and 10s are usually solid. The 11s are nearly free. Square numbers like 6 x 6 and 8 x 8 tend to stick because they sound nice. What's left is a much shorter list of genuinely tricky ones, and for most children that's the 6s, 7s, 8s and 12s, with 7 x 8 and 6 x 8 being the classic villains.

How to practise without it becoming a thing

Little and often beats one big slog. Three or four minutes in the car, a few facts while the toast is on, a quick sheet a couple of nights a week. Twenty minutes once a week does almost nothing. Five minutes most days does a lot.

Mix up the order so they can't predict it. If you always go 2, 3, 4, 5 in sequence, they learn the rhythm rather than the facts, and the check jumps around on purpose.

And go after the weak ones specifically. There's no point drilling the 10s your child already owns. Find the four or five facts that make them pause, and hammer those.

That last bit is the whole reason BoffinBox weights practice towards the facts a child keeps getting wrong, instead of serving up the same even spread every time. But you don't need an app for this. A scrap of paper and the seven times table will do the job. The check is small. Treat it as small, and your child probably will too.