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Sustaining Enthusiasm and Rewarding Achievements (TTRS)
Sustaining Enthusiasm and Rewarding Achievements (TTRS)

How to play on the rock theme to maintain pupils' interest and excitement in practising their times tables

Sarah Parrish avatar
Written by Sarah Parrish
Updated over 10 months ago

There's no quick fix to mastering the tables and improving multiplication recall speeds - it takes regular practice and commitment from pupils, which is why we need to ensure they remain motivated. This article will give you some ideas on how to maintain pupils' interest in Times Tables Rock Stars, following the initial excitement of a successful Launch Day.

Rock Status Certificates

With the Stats bolt-on, you are able to download status certificates for your class, auto-populated with each pupil's name, so you just need to print them or send them electronically as an attachment.

To do this please:

  1. Go to Stats > your class > Studio

  2. Press the 'Rock Status Certificates' button.

Gone Green Certificates

Heatmaps show you how quickly pupils are correctly responding to each fact. They are colour-coded based on speed:

A totally green heatmap means that a student has consistently answered all facts in 4 seconds or less. They must answer each fact at least 10 times in any game mode (apart from Jamming) at 4 seconds or less before it will turn green on their heatmap.

With the Stats bolt-on, you are able to automatically generate Gone Green certificates for your class at the click of a button!

To do this please:

  1. Go to Stats > your class > Fluency

  2. Press the 'Gone Green Certificates' button.

Custom Leaderboards and Certificates

Using the Custom Leaderboards feature, you can create leaderboards focused on pupils' Rock Speeds, number of correct answers or coins - recognising improvement, as well as overall scores.

Print off your leaderboards each week for your school's TTRS wall display. The printed leaderboards not only look awesome, but can be set to show children's rock names, rather than real names, to protect their anonymity:

Print out auto-populated certificates for the leaderboards' winners to present in whole school assemblies. Continuing to share and celebrate achievements on TTRS in school, will mean children are even more enthusiastic about playing at home.

To give your pupils even more motivation to climb the rock star ranks and be proud of their achievements, you may like to reward your top pupils with Rock Status badges, available from the TTRS Reward Shop:

School Displays

In addition to the custom leaderboards, there are plenty of printable resources available on our downloads page to help you make an awesome school display. Use the individual avatar cutouts to create an inspirational rock status wall, or create a Hall of Fame to recognise the week's top rockers!

Click here to view our printable wall displays, or take a look at the following images for more ideas.

For more inspiration check out our Pinterest board, or follow us on Twitter to keep up to date on the latest ideas from other TTRS schools:

School Competitions

One way to capture children's attention is to hold regular competitions. This could be as simple as having a class Arena game once a week, where the children can play against each other and their teacher in a live, one minute game. Children love to compete against their teacher and - be warned - if you allow your pupils to play against you, it won't be long before they're faster!

Another great competition is to hold a Battle of the Bands between two classes. You set the start and end time, and the class with the most correct answers across any game type, at the end is the winner. You can also download certificates for the top pupils in each class

Hold a live, knock out competition, called a Rock Wrangle, at the end of term, for the top pupils in the school. Not only will children work hard to be selected, but it will be an exciting day for the whole school, who'll look forward to watching and finding out who will be their school's Ultimate Rock Hero for Eternity

Rock Wrangle trophies are available from our Reward Shop.

You could incorporate the Rock Wrangle with other rock themed celebrations as part of the National Red Carpet Weeks. Fun ideas for events include:

  • Air guitar competition

  • Rock themed dress up

  • Red carpet

  • Certificate and prize giving assembly (trophies, badges and other merchandise are available from the TTRS Reward Shop)

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