My son, who has always loved math, was getting frustrated with it lately because of the multiplication issue. We are using McRuffy, which I love and would highly recommend, but he needed some extra help with the multiplication and division. He is a perfectionist and gets very upset when he gets anything wrong! We love music in our house so I set the multiples of different numbers to songs- for instance, "twinkle, twinkle, little star" became "7,14,21". Now he is doing much better at his facts and doesn't get so frustrated! Have you looked into McRuffy at all? They, like Saxon, have a spiral approach and include manipulatives and games. They also have the timed tests, but until he has really mastered his facts I just have him do them without timing it so that he doesn't get frustrated! This seems like a hard age for math because they are learning so many things and it seems like if they fall back on one things it sets everything else off too! Best of luck finding a good math program that works!