Calculating Area: Introduction to Multiplication

This week, we introduced multiplication to our students.  When I was in third grade, My teacher wrote the Zero rule and the Ones rule up on the board and we wrote them out in our notebooks to begin to "learn our times ables".  This week, we focused on calculating the area of rectangles. Why did we do this?

We want students to understand the relationship of repeated addition and multiplication right from the start.  Multiplication is a fast way of adding the same number over and over in your head.  When we use tiles to cover rectangles or look at them on the grid as we did with the homework, students can see that the columns and rows of a given number are repeated.  We practiced calculating area throughout the week using centimeter cubes and also inch tiles and writing our equations that go with a given measurement of an area.  We also emphasized the importance of writing area in square units, or inches squared. These rectangles are an example of an array.  Next week, we will continue to draw arrays and other pictures to help us solve multiplication problems and number stories and also continue to use repeated addition.

 

This week's math challenge question related to tiling a square patio with different sizes of tiles.  Students were supposed to create a visual to help them to solve this problem and answer the questions. Today in class, we used a flipchart I created to try and over different patios of different sizes and share out solutions.  Students may submit their papers on Monday to receive a coupon if they hadn't answered all of the questions today in class.

 

 

Nadir and Cheikh demonstrate some different ways to tile a 4 X 4 patio.  Students worked together to discover that no matter the number of different tiles used, a 4 X 4 patio will always need to be covered by tiles that add up to 16 square units.

I was very impressed with student's ideas for their homework Community Service Projects!  We have students doing all kinds of good deeds for neighbors and grandparents, cleaning up our Tamarack Triangle Trail, visiting patients at Children's Hospital and reading to the elderly at a nearby retirement community- just to name a few!  I can't wait for students to share their results at the end of the month!

This afternoon, we had Author's Chair.  We have many great writers in our class who have been working on all different stories.  In Writer's Workshop, we've also begun to do some persuasive writing. Students were allowed to select a piece to share with the class.  Here is a page out of one of Nadir's stories I found particularly funny:

Happy Friday!