Associative law

We talked about how the associative law is useful for helping you to work out more tricky multiplications. Below is a model using cubes to work out a simple example.

I started off by showing the children the array for 9 x 8

We then used the factor pairs of 8 to write the following statements and the children talked about breaking the array in half and stacking it. This really showed that the answer hadn't changed, but the array had been made more 3-dimensional.

We then discussed the order of numbers which would be most effective in helping you work out the multiplication sum.