Do you remember being asked by your children why they should learn tables when they would rather be doing something else?

Many parents face this question and are unclear as to how to answer it and motivate their children to learn the times tables.

A reply that tries to motivate children to learn tables can be expected along these lines;

1. There are very important for learning maths.

2. They will help you later in life and with your future career or job.

3. You'll have more choices as to what you want to do when you grow up.

4. The school wants you to learn tables so you'll understand maths.

These are the typical answers given by parents to their children in answer to this sort of question.

Turning to what teachers could say to motivate children, they often concentrate on benefits such as learning tables making it easier to understand using money and that other elements of maths will be easier;

1. If you learn times tables you will know how much a number of things cost when you know the cost of one.

2. Maths at school will not be as hard if you learn tables well.

All these are attempts at using logic and good facts to persuade children to learn tables.

There is a lesson to be learned from the world of persuasive speaking that in order to be persuasive you do need to use logic but you also need to appeal to the emotions.

Tapping into emotions can be the factor that results in you being successful in your persuasion.

The probability of people accepting your points is greater when you use both logic and emotion.

However, it is different when it comes to children.

In most cases using emotion is a far better persuasion strategy and it is no different to when it comes to persuading children to learn tables. Please don't rely on logic.

Here is the answer, to persuade your children to want to learn tables well explain that they are going to learn them by having a lot of fun, that it will be quick, and there will be a lot of play.

The idea is to persuade them to want to learn tables by appealing to what they love, appealing to what makes them happy, appealing to positive emotions.

A fun technique used to learn times tables that does appeal to the emotions uses movement, pictures and colour.

The key to persuade your children to learn tables is to use lots of fun activities and not logic.