Classroom Starter Activities

Before the activities: where this fits

This page is about activity formats — how to actually run a session. For which topic suits which year group and how to pace the year toward the Multiplication Tables Check, see For Teachers, which covers the curriculum-timing side in full.

1. The two-minute whole-class warm-up

Put the game on the classroom display, pick the topic that matches what's currently being taught, and run one 30-second round before the main lesson starts. Use full screen mode so the question fills the display without any browser chrome around it — genuinely useful for visibility from the back of the room, and now built as a CSS-based full screen that works reliably across whatever device is driving the display, not dependent on browser-specific fullscreen support.

Call out answers as a class, or pick individual pupils to answer verbally while you click. Keep it under two minutes — the point is re-activating recall before the lesson, not running a full session.

2. Paired practice with a score-swap

Pair pupils on classroom devices or tablets. Each plays one 60-second round on the same topic and difficulty, then swaps devices and plays their partner's saved best-score topic to try to beat it. This works well as an independent activity while you're circulating, and the built-in best-score memory (saved per device, per topic and difficulty) does the score-tracking for you without needing a separate record sheet.

3. Team relay

Split the class into small teams. One device per team, on a shared classroom device or your own display passed round. Each team member takes a turn answering just one question, then passes to the next — first team through a set number of questions, or the team with the most correct after a set time, wins. This turns individual recall practice into a genuinely social, energetic activity, and works particularly well as a Friday-afternoon or wet-playtime format.

4. Diagnostic five minutes

Early in a new topic (a new times table, a new number bonds range), give the whole class five minutes on that specific topic and watch response times rather than just correct/incorrect. Pupils who are visibly slow but eventually correct are still counting or deriving rather than recalling — useful, quick, informal information for grouping or targeted support, without needing a formal assessment.

5. Pre-MTC countdown (Year 4, spring term onward)

From the spring term, run a weekly round specifically on the MTC practice mode rather than the standard timed modes — the 6-second-per-question format is genuinely different from a running 60-second clock, and pupils benefit from getting used to that specific pacing well before the actual check in June. See the For Teachers curriculum page for the full term-by-term version of this plan, and our parent's guide if you're fielding questions from families about what the check actually involves.

A note on using it as a genuine assessment tool

The game isn't designed as a formal assessment instrument and scores aren't recorded anywhere beyond the individual device's local storage — treat anything observed here as informal, formative information (who's fast, who's still deriving, which facts a class collectively struggles with) rather than a number to record in a tracking system. For that kind of informal read on a class, the "practise my mistakes" toggle is also worth knowing about: switched on for a pupil over a few sessions, it quietly surfaces exactly which facts that individual keeps missing, which can be a useful conversation starter in a one-to-one check-in.