No matter what math curriculum you’re using, Math on the Level’s 9’s Down Math Facts books can be a help in learning and drilling the basic math facts and establishing a firm foundation for future work in math. There are two 9’s Down Math Facts books, one for learning the addition/subtraction facts, and one for learning the multiplication/division facts. These are sold both as a set and individually.

Each of these 160-page books contains more than a hundred math drills, reproducible for all the children your family is homeschooling. The books are made of sturdy, high-quality materials to hold up under long, steady use. The approach is a little different than most of the products I’ve seen for this purpose. Instead of starting with the smallest (and simplest?) facts, the 0, 1, 2 and 3 tables (in that order, and usually one at a time), the 9’s Down Math Facts drills begin with the 9s tables and work their way down from there.

Don’t worry! Your young math student is not going to implode. A very small number of facts appear on the first timed drill, and new facts are added gradually, so that you don’t overwhelm your learner. There are two drills for each new fact mastered.

If you’ve taught the math facts before, you’ve probably noticed that your students have the most confidence with the “easy” and early-taught facts. Not only are these easy (after all, adding zero and multiplying by one are pretty simple operations), but these, along with all the other “small number” facts, are drilled throughout the learning of the addition and multiplication tables! Now turn it around; teach the harder facts first and work your way down to the easier ones. The harder facts will have the most drill, and the work gets easier as you go. This approach makes sense.

In addition to the timed drills, the author has included a few introductory pages discussing how to use the 9’s Down Math Facts for fact mastery, reproducible progress charts, and a table showing where in the drills various facts are introduced. Answer keys for all the drills are included. The drill sheets themselves adapt to the student’s growing knowledge and confidence: Early in the book the drills are printed in a large font, fewer facts to the page, and the font size decreases with more facts to the page as you progress through the book.

Another nice feature is that the books are divided by operation. That is, in the addition/subtraction fact book, the student goes through all the addition drills for all the addition facts from 0+0 to 9+9 before being confronted with subtraction. Before subtraction is introduced, addition has been well learned. The multiplication/division book has the same format: a solid grounding in multiplication before division is required.

This was the method that worked for our eldest, after a couple of years of frustration in our early years. She would start to learn addition, only to have the textbook suddenly demand that she reverse the same facts and practice subtraction. She was maturationally ready to learn addition, but throwing in subtraction confused and discouraged her just as she was catching on to the idea of adding. She began to succeed in math only after we found a program that introduced all the addition facts and drilled them until she could do them forwards and backwards. Hey, wait a minute. “Backwards” addition just happens to be subtraction! (And the same thing with multiplication and division.)

So if you’re looking for a gradual introduction of the basic math facts, and a method that stresses understanding of those facts that tend to be the most difficult, you might want to consider 9’s Down Math Facts.