3rd Grade Home Support:
Multiplication & Division
- Encourage your child to practice skip-counting, forward and backward, by twos, threes, fours, fives, and tens (e.g., 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 27, 24, 21, 18, 15, 12, 9, 6, 3, 0).
- September-December: Continue to practice multiplication and division facts from memory with factors of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10. Have your child cut several triangles out of paper. Think of a multiplication or division fact. In each triangle, write two factors and their product (one number per corner). Cover one number with your thumb and ask your child to try to figure out what number is hidden. Ask your child to state two multiplication and two division sentences for the numbers on each triangle.
- Write multiplication and division facts that your child is struggling to remember on brightly colored sticky notes with one problem per sticky note. Hide the sticky notes in places where your child will encounter them: the bathroom mirror, inside a cupboard door, on the back of the driver’s headrest in the car, etc. Make a scavenger hunt out of it where your child will get something fun for finding all the facts and correctly answering them all.
- Play The Product Dice Game with your child.
- Player 1 rolls two dice and multiplies those two numbers together. On a piece of paper, write the multiplication equation and the product for that turn, which represents the score. Pass the dice to Player 2, who does the same. When the dice return to Player 1, add the product of the new roll to the previous score. The player who reaches 500 first is the winner.
- For example: Player 1 Roll 1: 5 × 4 = 20; Player 1 Roll 2: 6 × 5 = 30; 20 + 30 = 50, so Player 1’s score is now 50; Player 1 Roll 3: 2 × 3 = 6; 50 + 6 = 56, so Player 1’s score is now 56.
- Variation: Use one die and a deck of playing cards up to the 10’s (no aces or face cards). Roll one die, and then choose one card and multiply the two numbers together. This will help your child practice larger facts.
- Player 1 rolls two dice and multiplies those two numbers together. On a piece of paper, write the multiplication equation and the product for that turn, which represents the score. Pass the dice to Player 2, who does the same. When the dice return to Player 1, add the product of the new roll to the previous score. The player who reaches 500 first is the winner.
- January-June: Continue to practice multiplication facts for 6’s and 7’s from memory. For example, ask your child a 6-fact such as, “What is 5 × 6 or 5 sixes?” (30) Then say, “Add one more group of 6 to 30. What’s 6 × 6 or 6 sixes?” Your child should be able to do the mental math to add 6 to 30, answering “36.”
- Play How Many to 100 or Pepperoni Pizza games, or use these visual flashcards to practice matching facts to visual representations.
- Arrange objects around the house into arrays (small snack foods like crackers, fruit snacks, grapes, pretzels). Then write two multiplication and two division facts that the array could represent.
- Encourage your child to divide with tokens of any kind, such as pennies. Give your child, for example, 24 pennies. Then ask her to, “Divide your 24 pennies into 3 equal groups. How many pennies do you have in each group?” (8) “Now divide your 24 pennies in groups of 3. How many equal groups of pennies do you have? (8) In both scenarios, the answer is 8 (8 in each group when you have 3 groups and 8 groups when you have 3 in each group). This type of practice will help your child see the difference between representing the unknown group size versus representing the unknown number of groups. You can continue the sequence by replacing the 3 in the questions with 2, 4, 6, or 8.