About US || The story behind TIMES TABLES - "The Ultimate Way"
As a father of a boy with Autism, I was challenged to find different ways to teach him while homeschooling part time. One of the biggest challenges happened when I tried to teach my son the TIMES TABLES. Why? Because math is black and white, mistakes will happen very often. Failure would damage his child’s self esteem and confidence. There was no way to avoid it 🙁
Well… that was before I discovered Jumping Jack and Color Mix Multiplication!
Numbers in my life
I have worked over 15 years as a free lance tutor and owned a very successful small home-based center where I taught probabilities, statistics, finance, and math for business to more than 2,000 students in Peru.
I have also over 15 years of experience working in the banking industry doing one thing: building statistical models in the credit risk and marketing departments to support business decisions. I really enjoyed my jobs as a Senior Analyst in the leading Peruvian Bank as well as in Canada working for the National Bank, Bank of America, and TD bank.
So, numbers have been always in my life. I have been challenged to find ways to teach people as well as to find solutions for business problems. Creativity runs through my veins.
The challenge
After getting my son’s diagnosis with autism, our family’s life changed. Little by little I spent more and more time to raising my son to a point where I ended up losing my job – thing that I don’t regret. Overall, Andre was making great progress until he had to learn his TIMES TABLES. Because Math is black and white and numbers are an abstract concept this turned out to be a big challenge for him. One of the most heart-breaking situations parents can experience is how a simple math question, like a multiplication fact, can frustrate your child in such a way that it begins to seriously hurt his self-esteem and confidence. Just for not giving the right answer, my son would say over and over “I failed”. Sadly, when that happens you get emotionally blocked without knowing what to do. I also realized that this situation might be happening at school, and probably my child wouldn’t be able to answer a multiplication fact when most of the rest of the class was able to do it.
My son, my inspiration
Any caring parent would take this seriously, specially when you have a boy with autism. That’s when I decided to find a creative solution to teach him the TIMES TABLES and become my son’s hero. I focused on my son’s strengths and his previous knowledge. I identified that a powerful solution should be simple to understand, super effective, play-based, and multi-sensory. It is known that when you have a big problem, the best thing to do is to divide it in small parts.
First part of the problem was to get my son’s confidence back. That’s how I came up with JUMPING JACK MULTIPLICATION an amazing way to hack the TIMES TABLES. Basically, I gave my son superpowers to solve any multiplication fact with factors from 3 to 12 by mastering the easy 5s and 10s TIMES TABLES.
Then, the second part of the problem was to get him memorize his TIMES TABLES to quickly respond by heart. That’s how I came up with the COLOR MIX MULTIPLICATION method. It triggers your child’s memory with simple consistent rules leading to the answer by decoding images, boosting problem-solving skills. Both are easy, fun, fast, and effective.