Understanding Multiplication

Well, Hello! This year has been moving quickly, I can hardly believe we are in the middle of October!  This week we began our first of three chapters on multiplication in third grade.  I absolutely love, love, love Go Math's Understanding Multiplication chapter and how their self confidence grows as they learn each new strategy. 

On Day 1 we glued this fabulous foldable from The Busy Class on TPT, throughout the week, we filled out each strategy portion.  

Our first strategy was Drawing Groups...or pizzas with pepperoni...or cookies with chocolate chips, you'd think those little darlings never ate. Good grief.  So, after our debate about drawing groups/pizzas/cookies we continued on to move around the classroom with dry erase boards and recreated multiplication word problems using ordinary school supplies like the example above.  

This is my second year in a row starting off my unit with this lesson and I've been happy with my results both times.  Kids end the lesson feeling excited and confident about multiplication. Win! 

I always have fun working with arrays! I'm pretty sure my students love them just about as much as I do.  This year we created simple arrays during Computer Lab using Pixi and virtual stickers.  I love this dog sled racing team!

Since my kiddos grasped onto arrays quickly I decided to do a mini lesson on area.  This game was a ton of fun way to work on that skill and absolutely no prep work for me.  Again....WIN! Students needed graphing paper for each pair/trio, a separate color crayon, and two dice.  Players rolled the dice and created an array to match the multiplication equation.  The student who filled up the most boxes with their color wins.  

However, the showstopper for these little thirdsters was taking snapshots of arrays around the classroom and hallway.  I loved seeing my students find math within our real world! It's so exciting to see them so enthusiastic! 

The activity really was not anything Earth shattering...we used Show Me to import our pictures and write the appropriate multiplication sentence.  

Wish us luck as we attempt to tackle on the serious stuff next week....interpreting multi-operational word problems. Yikes!