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How do I teach multiplication and times tables online? (Or: what to use when a chant of the 7 times table isn't teaching)

Teaching multiplication online — and especially the times tables — works when the student can see what multiplication is before they memorise its facts. In practice that means three tools on the shared whiteboard that a Google Doc plus a screen-share can't give you: virtual number rods the student drags to build "three groups of four" as a physical picture (three 4-rods laid side by side, matched against a Ten-rod and a Two-rod, so 3 × 4 = 12 is a fact the eye sees rather than a rule the memory holds); virtual number lines the student hops along in fives, tens, threes, or sevens to anchor each times table in a skip-counting pattern before any drill; and a randomised roller the tutor can flick to generate fresh single-digit or two-digit multiplication problems for fluency practice, so the drill doesn't stall on the tutor inventing the next one. On Koala Go, the Number Rods and Number Lines live in the Whiteboard Library's Math Tools panel on the Pro tier — every paid tutor has them — and the Number Roller sits on Platinum (the plan most fluency-drill-heavy math practices upgrade to). The rest of this page walks through the arc: repeated addition with rods, arrays with rods, skip-counting on number lines, the strategies for the hard tables, fluency drills with the roller, and division as the mirror of multiplication.

Why teaching multiplication online is a specific kind of hard

Every grade-2-and-up tutor eventually hits it: the student who has memorised "3 × 4 = 12" as a chant but freezes on "how many is 4 lots of 3?" because the chant and the concept never met. In person, the fix is to reach for a set of counters, or a bag of Cuisenaire rods, or a pile of buttons — build three groups of four in front of the child, count the twelve, then match those groups against a "4 + 4 + 4" written on a piece of paper, then against a "3 × 4" on the same paper. The physical arrangement is the concept. Online, without the pieces, the tutor is either narrating over a webcam ("imagine three groups of four…") — which asks a lot of a seven-year-old's working memory — or drawing rows of dots on a whiteboard the student can't touch. Three problems show up together when teaching multiplication online, and the working online multiplication workflow has to answer all three.

  1. Multiplication is repeated addition, and the "repeated" part needs to be physical. The move that turns "3 × 4" from a rule into a picture is placing three separate quantities of four alongside each other and counting them as a whole. Passive watching of the tutor doing this on their side of a webcam doesn't build the concept; the child needs to place the rods themselves. Static pictures of arrays on a Google slide don't quite either — the student can look at them, but they can't build them, so the causal link ("if I add another 4 to the row, the total goes up by exactly 4") never lands.
  2. Times tables are memorised faster when they're skip-counted first, and skip-counting needs an annotatable line. Most working elementary teachers converge on the same sequence: before a child drills the "5 times table" as recall facts, they walk the 5s on a number line (0, 5, 10, 15, 20…) enough times that "5 × 6 = ?" becomes "six hops of five = 30" before it becomes "thirty". On a static number line printed on a worksheet, that walking is unfollowable at a distance; the student can't point at the hops as they say them, and the tutor can't see where the student is stuck. A shared, annotatable number line where the student pens the arcs from tick to tick fixes both.
  3. Fluency drill needs randomness the tutor doesn't manually invent. There's a middle stage, after concept and before fluency, where the student has "5 × 3 = 15" solidly but "7 × 8" is not automatic. The move that closes it is short randomised drill — five minutes of "roll two digits and multiply". If the tutor is generating those digits themselves ("hmm, let's say… 6 and 7"), the pacing stalls and the child sees the tutor thinking rather than the drill running. A physical die works in person; a shared digital roller works online.

An online multiplication workflow that actually works has an answer to each of the three: draggable equal-length rods for building groups and arrays, annotatable preset number lines for skip-counting the anchor tables, and a randomised roller for the fluency-drill stage. Koala Go's Math Tools panel ships all three. Below is how each maps to a specific teaching move, in the order you'd actually reach for them across a grade-2-through-5 arc.

The tools that make multiplication learnable on a webcam

All four of the tools below live in the Whiteboard Library's Math Tools panel on Koala Go's shared whiteboard. Both you and the student can pick up, drag, and rearrange every one of them in real time — the student is doing the maths, not watching.

Number rods for repeated addition and for arrays

Number rods (Pro tier) are the workhorse manipulative for the concept side of multiplication. Ten Cuisenaire-style coloured rods, one unit through ten units long, that you drop onto the whiteboard and rearrange. Same tool the number-sense spoke uses for early counting and number bonds — the difference is what you build with them.

Two patterns that carry most of grades 2-3 multiplication:

  • Multiplication as repeated addition. To build "3 × 4", place three 4-rods end to end in a single row, so the row is twelve units long. Underneath, place a Ten-rod and a Two-rod to make twelve — the student sees that "four and four and four" is the same length as "ten and two", which is twelve. Write "3 × 4 = 12" in a text box next to the picture (see the math notation spoke for the × symbol). Then rebuild the same fact as "4 × 3": four 3-rods end to end, same twelve. That side-by-side comparison is the visual proof of the commutative property (that "a × b = b × a") and it doesn't get taught as well any other way.
  • Multiplication as an array. To build "3 × 4" as an array, place three 4-rods as three separate rows, one above another — each row four units long. The student now sees the "three rows of four" that the notation is describing. Sliding the stack together and apart shows that the total (twelve) is the same however you count it, which is where "3 × 4 = 12 and 4 × 3 = 12" starts making concrete sense. This is the same tool from the same panel, used slightly differently — arrays for "rows and columns", repeated addition for "groups of".

The rods are on the Pro tier ($25.99/month monthly, $21.99/month annual, or included in a business plan), so any working paid tutor has access. Free-tier tutors see the rods in the panel but locked behind an upgrade nudge. Two Platinum-only extras occasionally help specifically for multiplication work: the red-and-blue alternating fill (each rod visually breaks into its unit count, which supports "count the units" fluency work when a child still isn't seeing that a 4-rod is four ones), and the "add all" one-click staircase (drops all ten rods on the canvas in order — the fastest reset for the start of a new array). Neither is required for the core teaching; they're workflow speedups if the specific mechanic is how you were taught to use rods.

Number lines for skip-counting the times tables

The move that anchors each times table before drill is skip-counting on a number line: hopping "0, 5, 10, 15, 20…" for the 5s, "0, 10, 20, 30…" for the 10s, "0, 3, 6, 9, 12…" for the 3s. Koala Go's Whiteboard Library ships eight preset number lines on the Pro tier (see the number-sense spoke for the full list), of which three carry most times-table skip-counting:

  • 0 to 100 by 5 (Pro). The line for the 5 times table — every labelled tick is a multiple of 5, so hopping tick-to-tick from 0 to 50 walks the student through 5×1 through 5×10 directly. Same line supports the 10s implicitly (hop two ticks at a time).
  • 0 to 100 by 10 (Pro). The clean version for the 10s — every labelled tick is a multiple of ten. Also the line for place-value multiplication: "what's 4 × 20?" is four hops of twenty — or eight hops of ten — landing on 80.
  • 0 to 30 (Pro). Steps of 1 up to 30. Skip-counting the 3s from 0 through 30 covers 3×1 through 3×10 with tick-to-tick pen arcs. The same line covers the 2s (hop two ticks) through 2×10, and the 4s (hop four ticks) through 4×7. This is the line most K-3 tutors reach for when teaching the 3s and 4s.

Both you and the student annotate directly on top of any line — drop pen arcs from tick to tick, coloured differently for different hop sizes, and label each landing point. That is the whole point: the line is a shared surface, not a picture the student is watching over your shoulder. Every preset line is resizable and movable, and you can duplicate a line to place two side by side (say, the 0-to-30 and the 0-to-100-by-5 for comparing the 3s against the 5s).

For the harder tables — the 6s, 7s, 8s, and 9s — the presets fall short: a 0-30 line hosts the 3s neatly but a 6× table needs to hop to at least 72 (6×12), which is off the end of the 0-30 line, and the step-1 preset above 30 doesn't tick individually anyway. Koala Platinum unlocks a "make your own" custom number line — you type a start, an end, and a step, and the whiteboard renders a line to spec. So a "0 to 72 in steps of 6" line for the 6s, a "0 to 84 in steps of 7" line for the 7s, a "0 to 96 in steps of 8" line for the 8s, and a "0 to 108 in steps of 9" line for the 9s all become one-click builds. A tutor whose caseload leans on the 6s-through-9s skip-counting anchor typically upgrades to Platinum for exactly this workflow. We'd rather say this plainly than fudge it: there's no clean Pro equivalent, because none of the eight preset lines ticks at 6, 7, 8, or 9.

Number Roller for fluency drills

Once the concept is solid and the anchor tables are skip-countable, the middle stage of times-table learning is short randomised drill — five to eight minutes at the end of a lesson, or the start of the next one, where the student is asked a stream of one-digit or two-digit multiplication questions in random order and answers them under time pressure. The tool for that stage on Koala Go is the Number Roller, and it sits on the Platinum tier.

The Number Roller drops a row of number tiles on the canvas with a Reroll button underneath — tap Reroll and every tile lands on a fresh random number in the range you set. What that gives you:

  • Range presets 1-6, 1-10, 1-12, 1-20, 1-50, 1-100, and 1-1000. The 1-12 preset covers the standard "times tables up to 12" sweep; the 1-10 covers the "up to 10s" version; the 1-6 mimics a physical die if you want to keep the workflow feeling like a game.
  • One to four numbers on the roller. Set it to two numbers at 1-10 and each roll gives you two random single digits — the classic "3 × 7" fluency shape. Three numbers give you triple products for advanced work. A single number on a 1-100 range, multiplied by a digit you type yourself, covers multi-digit practice.
  • A padlock on every tile. Each number has a small padlock above it. Lock one tile at 7 and only the other tile rerolls — so the drill sweeps the 7 times table specifically instead of a mixed bag. This is the setting that turns the roller from a general random-number tool into a one-table-at-a-time drill, which is how times tables should be practised in the first place.
  • Whole or decimal. Whole numbers for the standard times tables; decimal rolls for later multiplication of decimals practice (a 1-6 range with decimals gives values like 3.5, 4.7 — useful once decimal multiplication is on the curriculum).
  • Custom min/max. If the presets don't fit — say, a 4-through-9 range specifically to hammer the harder tables — you set a custom minimum and maximum and the roller respects them.

The practical workflow: place one roller set to show two numbers on the 1-12 range at the top of the canvas. Tap Reroll — say it lands on "6 and 8". The student answers "48". Reroll — "3 and 9". Student answers "27". Cycle for five minutes. The tutor's hands stay free (no rolling a physical die, no thinking up the next problem), the pacing stays fast, and the pair of digits is genuinely random so the student can't game the order. That specific "the tutor doesn't have to invent the next problem" mechanic is what buys back the engagement in a fluency drill that would otherwise stall on tutor decision-latency.

The Number Roller is Platinum-only — on Free and Pro the tile appears in the Math Tools panel but locked behind a Platinum upgrade prompt. Enterprise / B2B tutors are provisioned at the Pro feature level and every Platinum tool is hidden rather than locked, so a business-plan teacher won't see the roller as an option at all. If your caseload doesn't lean on fluency drill (say, you tutor conceptual work only and pass drill to a between-lesson app like Times Table Rock Stars), the roller is skippable; if it does, it's the specific Platinum feature that earns the upgrade.

Math Symbols for the multiplication sentence

The written notation for multiplication is × (proper multiplication sign, U+00D7) and ÷ (proper division sign, U+00F7) — not the keyboard asterisk "*" or forward slash "/". Both live in the Math Symbols palette's Operations category on the Pro tier, alongside +, −, and =. The palette's two entry points (Whiteboard Library "Math Symbols" folder and the ∑ popup that appears next to a selected text or sticky) are described in depth in the math notation spoke. For multiplication work specifically, the workflow is: build the array or the repeated-addition picture with rods, drop a text box next to it, type the coefficient digit, click × from the palette, type the second coefficient, click =, type the answer. The palette's × and ÷ read as the notation the student sees in their textbook, so what's on the whiteboard matches what's on the page.

A working sequence for teaching multiplication online

Most elementary curricula build multiplication in roughly the same order: repeated addition first, then arrays as a formal model, then skip-counting the anchor tables (2s, 5s, 10s), then the derived tables (3s, 4s), then the harder tables (6s, 7s, 8s, 9s), then fluency retrieval, then multi-digit and long multiplication. What changes online isn't the sequence — it's which tool on the Math Tools panel each stage reaches for. Grade bands below are typical US placements, not a standards mapping — adapt to the curriculum and the student in front of you.

  1. Multiplication as repeated addition (grades 2 to 3). Place two 4-rods end to end in a row. Ask the student what one rod would exactly match their combined length — they'll reach for an 8. Write "4 + 4 = 8". Now place a third 4-rod at the end, extending the row to twelve. Write "4 + 4 + 4 = 12". Now write "3 × 4 = 12" underneath, and read it as "three lots of four". The rods are the referent for "three lots"; the notation is the shorthand. Repeat with a couple of other small products (2×5, 3×3, 4×2) so the referent-and-shorthand pairing settles before moving on.
  2. Multiplication as an array (grade 3). Take the same "3 × 4" and rearrange: three 4-rods as three separate rows of four, one above another. Point out that the total is still 12 — the arrangement changed, the quantity didn't. This is the concrete introduction to the commutative property. Then rotate the picture (mentally, or by placing four 3-rods in four rows of three) and ask the student what the total is. They'll count 12 either way. Write "3 × 4 = 4 × 3 = 12" underneath. This is the moment the "you only have to memorise half the times-table grid because 6 × 7 is the same as 7 × 6" idea lands, and it's much cleaner as a rod picture than as a spoken rule.
  3. Skip-counting the anchor tables — 10s, then 5s, then 2s (grade 3). Place a 0-100-by-10 number line. Ask the student to hop the tens from 0 — pen arcs from 0 to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, saying each number aloud. Ten hops takes them to 100. Now the 10 times table is "how many hops did I do?" — one hop is 10, two hops is 20, three hops is 30. Repeat with the 0-100-by-5 line for the 5s, and the 0-20 line (steps of 1) for the 2s (double-hopping). Write each times table out in a text box next to the line as the student says it — the notation and the picture reinforce each other.
  4. The 3s and 4s on the 0-30 line (grade 3). Place a 0-30 line (steps of 1). Skip-count the 3s from 0 — pen arcs three at a time, 0-3, 3-6, 6-9, up to 30 (which is 3 × 10). Same line for the 4s, hopping four ticks at a time up to 4 × 7 = 28. Write the times table out as the student says it. Because the ticks are individual, this is where the "3, 6, 9, 12…" chant gets tied to the visual arc — the number of arcs is the multiplier.
  5. The hard tables — 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s — on a custom line (grades 3 to 4, Platinum recommended). The preset lines don't stretch to the natural end of the 6s (72), 7s (84), 8s (96), or 9s (108). On Koala Platinum, the "make your own" custom line lets you build a "0 to 72 in steps of 6" line for the 6s, a "0 to 84 in steps of 7" for the 7s, and so on. Skip-counting the 6s from 0 to 72 on such a line ties each fact ("6 × 4 = 24", "6 × 7 = 42") to the specific tick the student's arc lands on. This stage genuinely needs Platinum — on Pro there's no preset that ticks at 6, 7, 8, or 9, so the honest move is to teach the hard tables through the derived-facts strategies in the next step rather than to fake a line that doesn't fit.
  6. Derived-facts strategies for the hard tables (grades 3 to 4). Once the anchor tables (2s, 5s, 10s) are solid, the derived-facts strategies collapse a lot of the memorisation load. Two moves worth teaching explicitly:
    • Doubling the 2s to get the 4s, and doubling the 4s to get the 8s. If the student knows "2 × 7 = 14" from their 2s, then "4 × 7" is just "two lots of 14" — 28. And "8 × 7" is "two lots of 28" — 56. Build the doubling picture with rods: 2×7 as two 7-rods, doubled to four 7-rods, doubled to eight 7-rods, next to a 56-length composed row (five 10-rods plus a 6-rod). The student sees the doubling actually happening.
    • The "one less than a ten" trick for the 9s. 9 × 6 is "ten sixes minus one six" — 60 − 6 = 54. Build ten 6-rods in a row (or a 10-rod stacked on top of ten 6-rods rotated vertically), remove one 6, and count what's left. Write "9 × 6 = 10 × 6 − 6 = 60 − 6 = 54" in a text box. The rule stops being magic; it's arithmetic the student did.
  7. Fluency retrieval — Number Roller drills (grades 3 to 4, Platinum for the roller). Once concept and skip-counting are solid, move to short retrieval-practice drills using the Number Roller. One roller showing two numbers on the 1-12 range, five minutes, student answers each roll — and lock one tile to the table you're working on if you want the drill focused rather than mixed. Track which pairs are automatic and which are still slow — the slow ones become the next lesson's rods-and-lines work. If your practice is on Koala Pro rather than Platinum, the drill workflow is a paper flash-card pack the parent handles between lessons; if it's Platinum, the drill happens on the whiteboard where you can see and reset it.
  8. Multi-digit multiplication with a Pro rectangle grid (grade 4 onwards). Introduce two-digit multiplication (say, 23 × 4) with an area-model / grid approach: place a rectangle from the shape library (rectangle is on Pro), split it visually into "20" and "3" columns, and multiply each partial by 4 — 20 × 4 = 80, 3 × 4 = 12, so 23 × 4 = 92. This is the picture-based lattice / area-model version of long multiplication most curricula teach before the columnar algorithm. On Platinum, the shape-labels toggle adds label slots at the rectangle's corners and centre that you type into, so the "20", the "3", and the partial products can sit on the picture itself rather than beside it. The traditional columnar algorithm ("carry the 1") then sits underneath the picture in a text box, with the palette's × drawing the line — picture first, algorithm second.

Most sessions won't move through all eight stages in one lesson; a typical 30-minute grade-3 session picks one or two adjacent stages (say, the 3s on the 0-30 line plus a five-minute Number Roller drill on the 1-6 range for the 2s and 5s from last week), cycles between manipulative and drill, and includes an engagement break. The tools are the same tools; the sequencing is what makes the lesson.

Division as the mirror of multiplication

Multiplication and division are almost the same operation seen from two ends. Once the student can build "3 × 4 = 12" with three 4-rods against a 12-length, they can build "12 ÷ 3 = 4" as the same picture, read backwards: "I have a length of 12. How many 4-rods do I need to match it? Three." Same rods, same total, same picture — different question asked of it. This is the concrete introduction that most division curricula prescribe, and it moves online as cleanly as the multiplication version.

Two patterns:

  • Division as "how many groups of N?" Start with a Ten-rod and a Two-rod end to end — a length of twelve. Ask the student to build a matching row using only 4-rods. They place three. Write "12 ÷ 4 = 3". The rods are the same rods; the question is different. This is the "quotative" interpretation of division and it's the one that connects most directly to multiplication as repeated addition.
  • Division as "share into N groups." Same 12-length. Ask the student to split it into three equal groups using rods of one value each. They'll reach for three 4-rods. Write "12 ÷ 3 = 4". This is the "partitive" interpretation, and it's the everyday-language meaning of "share".

Written notation: the palette's ÷ (proper division sign, Pro tier) drops into the same text box the multiplication sentence lives in. Long division (grades 4 to 6) works the same way as long multiplication above — set up the traditional layout in a text box, work through digit by digit, and use the rectangle / area-model picture from step 8 above when the student stalls on why the algorithm is doing what it's doing.

Keeping fluency drills from feeling like drill (for younger learners)

The engagement problem multiplication tutoring hits hardest is the fluency-drill stage. A grade-3 student who's happily built arrays for twenty minutes hits the wall at minute twenty-five if minute twenty-six is a five-minute stream of "6 × 7 = ?". The Number Roller helps by making the drill feel like a game (the roll is random, the tutor didn't invent the next problem) — but the engagement layer of the classroom does the rest of the lift, and it's the same layer described in depth in the gamified virtual classroom answer. For a multiplication-heavy caseload specifically:

  • Gems for each correct roll, not for the whole set. Each student on Koala Go has a visible Gem balance; the tutor gives 1-100 Gems from the student panel in a single click, and the student sees the balance grow live. A drill rhythm of "roll → answer → 1 Gem correct, 1 Gem for a good near-miss" is more engaging than "1000 Gems if you get 20 in a row" — small immediate reinforcement wins over big deferred reward for this age band.
  • The Playground as a short reset between drill blocks. A two-to-three-minute walk around the shared 3D space between two blocks of drill is a lower-friction attention reset than "let's take a water break" — the student doesn't leave the tab, and the reset happens inside the same classroom.
  • Track drill progress on the whiteboard, visibly. Drop a text box: "Fours: automatic. Sixes: getting there. Sevens: still slow." Update it at the end of each drill block. The student sees a visible record of the tables that have moved from "still slow" to "getting there" to "automatic" over three or four sessions. Parents notice this too — see below.

A note on students who need more time on the harder tables: some students genuinely need more repetitions and more time than a curriculum's default pacing, and that doesn't necessarily mean anything clinical. Slow it down, hold on the anchor tables until they're truly automatic before adding a new one, and lean heavily on the "derived facts" strategies from step 6 so the student is doing arithmetic rather than trying to memorise thirty-six new facts. If a specific student's difficulties with multiplication are consistent enough that you're wondering about a math learning difference, that conversation belongs with the family and a qualified specialist, not with a webpage — the dyscalculia answer walks through the SEN-specific pattern where multiplication needs the concrete-first stage held longer.

Practice, homework, and the multiplication sites you already use

Between-lesson practice is where multiplication fluency actually consolidates. Most working online multiplication tutors have a small set of practice sites they trust for drill and games — Math Playground, Prodigy, Khan Academy's multiplication units, times-table-specific practice sites the student's school already uses. Bringing these into the lesson via the cobrowser rather than sending them as a link earns its keep in exactly this workflow. A cobrowser (explained in what is a cobrowser?) is a shared browser window inside the classroom: you open the site, and both you and the student can click, type, drag on the live page — actual shared control. Two multiplication-specific patterns that work:

  • Rods on the whiteboard, then a matching drill on a practice site. Ten minutes on the whiteboard building the 6s array with rods, then ten minutes in the cobrowser on a "match the fact to the answer" game for the 6 times table. The rods built the concept; the site consolidates it in a different modality without the student leaving the lesson room.
  • Practice-site question first, rods to debug. Open a mixed-times-table drill on a practice site. If the student stalls on "8 × 7 = ?", pause the site and switch back to the whiteboard — build the array (eight 7-rods, or seven 8-rods), work it out together (56 as ten 5-rods plus one 6-rod, or 56 as five 10-rods plus a 6-rod), and then return to the site. The debug loop between the abstract problem and the concrete picture is one of the strongest teaching moves an online multiplication tutor has.

Two honest notes on the cobrowser: on Koala Free, sessions are capped at 10 minutes per session with a 20-minute cool-down — fine for a single practice segment in a 30-minute grade-3 lesson, but restrictive if you want the practice site as the primary surface. Full-length cobrowser access is Koala Pro and up. For between-lesson practice on a paper worksheet, you can upload it as a PDF (PDF/PowerPoint upload is a Pro-tier feature) and both of you annotate on top of it at the start of next week's lesson — the workflow is covered in how do I give homework to online tutoring students?

Common failure modes and honest limits

Things that go wrong in online multiplication lessons, and the fix:

  • Teaching times tables as pure chant before any picture. A student who has memorised "3, 6, 9, 12, 15…" as a chant but can't build "3 × 4" as three 4-rods against a 12 has a fragile fluency — the chant works until the question is asked out of order ("what's 3 × 7?"), and then they have to start the chant from the beginning. Build the arrays first, chant later. The chant is the compressed form of the picture; the picture has to exist before the compression means anything.
  • Skipping arrays and jumping to memorisation. A student who has never physically arranged three rows of four and counted them has no anchor for "3 × 4 = 12" when the fact fades. The array is not decoration; it's the mental model the student calls back to when the memorised fact isn't automatic yet.
  • Using "*" or "x" instead of ×, and "/" instead of ÷. The keyboard's asterisk and letter-x are not the multiplication sign; the forward slash is not the division sign. The palette's × (U+00D7) and ÷ (U+00F7) read as the notation in the student's textbook. Use them. The math-notation spoke covers the mechanics.
  • Drilling every table at once instead of one at a time. A grade-3 student can hold one new times table at a time in active learning. Introduce the 10s, drill the 10s to automatic before adding the 5s, drill the 5s to automatic before adding the 2s, and so on. Trying to work all twelve tables in a mixed drill before the anchors are solid produces confused fluency.
  • Ignoring the commutative property to halve the memorisation load. The times-table grid is symmetric — a student who has "7 × 8 = 56" also has "8 × 7 = 56". Point this out explicitly when introducing arrays; the rod picture proves it visually. Kids who don't notice this halving spend twice as long as they need on the same tables.
  • Running drill without an anchor line to fall back on. When a student stalls on "6 × 8 = ?" in the middle of a Number Roller drill, if there's no 0-100-by-5 line or 0-100-by-10 line on the canvas to skip-count from, the student either guesses or gives up. Keep the anchor line for the current times table visible on the canvas during drill, even if it's off to one side, so the student always has a place to reason from.
  • iPad-only workflows. Koala Go works on iPad, but placing precise rod arrays and drawing skip-counting arcs is fiddlier on a finger than on a mouse. If a student uses iPad exclusively, plan around larger rods (arrays of Sixes and Sevens are easier to grab than arrays of Twos and Threes), and use the Text tool for the notation side more heavily.

Two limits worth naming plainly rather than papering over:

  • The Number Roller is Platinum-only. On Koala Free and Koala Pro, the Number Roller tile appears in the Math Tools panel but is locked behind a Platinum upgrade prompt. Enterprise / B2B plans are Pro feature level and don't include Platinum tools at all. If fluency drill is a heavy share of your practice, factor that into the plan choice; if it isn't (say, you focus on conceptual and calculation work and pass drill to a between-lesson app), the Pro tier is enough.
  • The "make your own" number line is Platinum-only. The Pro tier's eight preset lines cover the 2s, 5s, 10s, and 3s cleanly (via the 0-30, 0-100-by-5, and 0-100-by-10 lines). The 6s, 7s, 8s, and 9s at their natural top ends (72, 84, 96, 108) need the Platinum custom line, and there's no clean Pro substitute — no preset ticks at 6, 7, 8, or 9. On Pro you teach those tables through derived facts and the roll-free strategies above instead of on a line.

Sharing multiplication progress with parents

Times-table progress is one of the parts of tutoring parents most want to hear about — it's concrete, measurable, and lines up with the report cards that come home. The highest-signal parent update names the specific table that moved from "still slow" to "automatic" this week, quotes a drill stat, and gives a specific home-practice ask.

A few concrete moves:

  • Screenshot the drill-progress text box each week. The whiteboard state persists between sessions, so at the end of each lesson your "Fours: automatic. Sixes: getting there. Sevens: still slow." text box is still there. A screenshot in the parent update is evidence of progress in a way "great lesson today!" isn't.
  • Send a specific practice ask. Not "please practise multiplication this week" (vague) — "please run through the 6 times table twice a day, forward from 6, then backwards from 60, and let us know which pairs took longest." The parent can verify it, and the "which pairs took longest" comes back to next lesson as the specific rods-and-lines work. Cadence covered in how do I share progress updates with parents?
  • Record short clips of key breakthrough moments where consent is in place. Koala Pro includes local recording; Koala Platinum adds cloud recording of scheduled lessons. A 60-second clip of the child answering ten random 7×n rolls without hesitation for the first time is worth every second of the setup. Get the family's written permission before recording anything with a minor; the storage, sharing, and consent detail is covered in how do I record online tutoring lessons?

Practical setup on Koala Go for a multiplication-heavy caseload

If you're evaluating Koala Go for K-5 multiplication tutoring specifically, here's the practical picture and where the current lines sit:

  • Whiteboard is the lesson surface. The classroom's whiteboard is a Fabric.js canvas with the Math Tools panel: ten Cuisenaire-style Number Rods valued 1-10 (Pro) for arrays and repeated addition, eight preset Number Lines including 0-30, 0-100-by-5, and 0-100-by-10 (Pro) for anchor-table skip-counting, and the Math Symbols palette (Operations set on Pro) for the ×, ÷, and = glyphs. The rectangle from the base shape library (Pro) is the tool for area-model / grid multiplication for two-digit and multi-digit work.
  • Number Roller for fluency drills (Platinum, $49.99/month monthly, $39.99/month annual). The Pro tier ($25.99/month monthly, $21.99/month annual) covers everything through the concept and skip-counting stages, and is the plan most K-3 multiplication tutors run on. The Platinum tier adds the Number Roller for randomised drill and the "make your own" custom line for the 6s-through-9s natural-range lines — the specific additions a grade-3-through-5 multiplication-heavy caseload leans on.
  • Upload existing multiplication worksheets. On Koala Pro and up, upload the student's times-tables worksheet as a PDF or PowerPoint and annotate on top of it. Uploaded material stays on the whiteboard between lessons.
  • Cobrowser for practice sites. Open Math Playground, Prodigy, Khan Academy's multiplication units, or whatever times-table practice site your programme uses; the student clicks and drags on the live page inside the lesson room. 10 minutes at a time on Free with a 20-minute cool-down; unlimited on Pro and up.
  • Playground and Gems for the drill-engagement layer. The K-3 age band leans on the engagement layer to sustain fluency drill blocks; older students lean less on it. The mechanic is described in what is a gamified virtual classroom?
  • Recording for parent review. Local recording is on Pro; cloud recording of scheduled lessons comes with Platinum. Either supports the "send a 60-second clip of the breakthrough" pattern above.
  • Free tier limits worth knowing. Koala Free caps sessions at four students and includes the whiteboard plus a capped cobrowser — but the Math Tools panel (rods, number lines, symbols, roller) is Pro-and-up. Free is a trial surface for multiplication tutoring, not the day-to-day.

Honest limits worth flagging that show up in real multiplication work regardless of platform: iPad is rougher than desktop for precise-array placement and skip-counting arc drawing; students in mainland China sometimes hit connection issues (we route through Hong Kong proxies but the Great Firewall is a moving target — see teaching students in mainland China for the workaround pattern); the Number Roller and "make your own" number line are Platinum-only (the eight preset lines cover most needs on Pro, but the 6-through-9 times-tables workflow is cleaner on Platinum); and the palette is a symbols set rather than an equation renderer, so long multiplication's columnar layout is a text box laid out manually rather than a rendered algorithmic template.

Related answers in the math cluster

This spoke sits inside a wider math-tutoring cluster we're building out. The neighbouring pages that cover an adjacent question:

If you'd like a walk-through of the rods, lines, and roller setup for a specific unit or student you're planning, open Koala Go at classroom.teachwithkoala.com, or write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about the shape of your multiplication tutoring and we'll give you our honest read on the fit.

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