Eastern Children Do Better At Times Tables And Maths Than Western. Here Is How Your Children Can Do As Well!

On average Western children do not progress as quickly in maths as Eastern children. This is because the Eastern number system is easier to understand. There is a way for Western taught children to be as good and this article tells you how parents can make a huge difference and help their children for times tables and maths in general

Malcolm Gladwell is an author and journalist. He is best known for his several bestselling books including; The Tipping Point and Outliers. Amazingly he has a lesson for parents in regard to times tables.

In his book Outliers, The Story of Success, Malcolm focuses on what it is that makes people successful.

Here we are going to look at what makes children successful at maths and the times tables.

Malcolm regards the individual’s background rather then their innate ability as being particularly important.

So, what insights can we take with respect to someone’s background and the learning of times tables for children?

He looks at the number naming systems in Western and Asian countries and how children learn them.

He highlights that there is a big difference between the two. You will see that this difference affects early maths and times tables.

For example the number system in English is highly irregular. This is not the case for countries such as China, Japan and Korea.  They have a logical counting system.

Examples that highlight this are as follows;

Eastern countries express eleven as ten one, twelve as ten two, twenty two as two tens two, twenty four is two ten four.

Do you see the difference? What would a number such as forty seven be? The answer following the Eastern method is four tens seven. Easy and in fact much easier and more logical than the Western method.

The result of this difference is that Asian children learn to count much quicker than Western children.

Malcolm gives examples of this by pointing out that Chinese four year olds can on average count to 40 whereas American children average 15 and don’t reach 40 until they are five years old.  

The Eastern number system makes addition and subtraction much easier than in the West.

This affects Eastern children’s attitude towards maths so that they are much more positive about it than in the West.

Because the number system makes it easier to follow, Eastern children can find the patterns in maths. 

Eastern children can more easily work out what is happening and maths and number are easier to understand at a much younger age.

As a result of this issue times tables are learned later in Western countries than in Eastern countries.

However, there is a way for any child to gain a huge advantage in learning times tables.

The solution is for your children to learn the times tables using images, colour and location to fix the questions and answers in their minds.

This improves maths and times tables learning by focusing the learning on use of memory rather than having to learn numbers by rote. It is what the world memory champions do.

Images and location are two key ingredients to learning times tables really well.

For more information go to www.TimesTablesMaths.com