With Numicon!

I love this lesson as it really helps children understand the main laws of multiplication.

I always start by displaying the Numicon and asking which times table fact it could represent. I then ask the children where each number comes from. "Why 6?" then get them to explain that there are six pieces or groups. "Where did the 5 come from?" and so on.

I then ask for another way this could be written. Children then swap the numbers around and we talk about the commutative law and what commute means. I then show this with the Numicon. I find it helps to also link it to repeated addition here.

When I did this lesson yesterday, a child started talking about stating with the biggest number first and we got on to the inverse.

I then ask the children to represent the times table fact in as many ways as possible, showing how they can do that through grouping. We then talk about the distributive law. This leads really well into the associative law.

In the above picture, one child said he grouped the 6 into 2 + 2 + 2. I asked how many holes were in each 'group' and we then showed this by rotating the Numicon and fitting it together to make a 10.

This then led into it being the same as 3 x 10 which is also the same as 10 lots of 3. I showed the 10 lots of 3 with the Numicon and asked the children to group it again. This then demonstrated the associative law.