Making Arrays is the second post in our series on games and activities to support basic facts as well as conceptual understanding. This time we’re delving into multiplication and division.
If you missed the first one which explored basic facts relating to addition and subtraction facts within 10 and 20 (and extensions of this) take a look here: Strike It Out
In this one, we’ve taken the concept of making arrays and used it to explore all of the following:
- Thinking carefully about moving from concrete representations to increasingly abstract representations
- Understanding multiplication and division (including both grouping and sharing)
- Making sense of the relationship between multiplication and division
- Understanding the properties of multiplication and division including:
- The commutative property
- The distributive property
- The associative property
- We’ve included some ideas for how to teach a range of strategies that are based on these properties as well as extending this to multi-digit multiplication
- And finally some explorations into factors and multiples.
There is loads more we could have done with this but that’s probably enough for now. Look out for a future extension of this to include multi-digit division and some ideas related to algebra including multiplying out brackets.
Click on the link here to view the PDF of Making Arrays which includes more detailed information including things to think about, questioning and details of games that can be played with these ideas.
Enjoy!
Highland Numeracy Blog 