December 8, 2020

Partial Products and Area Model

Fourth grade students are working hard in their grade level math classrooms to understand multiplying double digit numbers. In order for students to understand the concepts of what happens when we multiply tens and ones, we use partial products. This will explain to students what happens to numbers as we multiply them.

In third grade your child was introduced to arrays as a way of illustrating repeated addition and to visualize multiplication as repeated "groups of" objects. Area model is a way to illustrate partial products. Instead of drawing arrays we move to a quick sketch the represents the rows and columns that would be in the arrays.

In order for you child to be successful with a conceptual understanding of multidigit multiplication, they will need these background skills.

• apply an understanding that every place value space is tens times greater than the one before it. (See below)

• Understanding of multiplicative reasoning (initial groupings, skip counting, groups of groups, multiplication facts)

These concepts are important to students continuing math progress as they will be moving to dividing multidigit numbers.

October 6, 2020

Fourth grade students are working hard in their grade level math classrooms to understand place value and strengthen their number sense. In fourth grade part of this means that the students need to be able to explain and use the concept that every place value space is ten times greater then the one before it or times less then the one after it (6X 10 is 60 and 60X 10 is 600 or 60 divided by 10 is 6).

In order to understand this idea, children first need to understand that 10 tens makes 100, 10 hundreds makes 1000 and so on. This is not something we want them to memorize. It is a concept that they should be able to explain.

Once students understand this, we can build off the idea to read and write numbers in expanded form, compare numbers and round numbers to any place value place.