Happy ‘hump’ day friends…I’m here to share some tips on teaching the associative property of multiplication…sounds kinda dry huh?!?! Well if you know me I try ( very hard ) not to make things dry for my students so here’s what we were up to today!
Welcome to another edition of :
If you aren’t familiar with the video series on you tube by: Math & learning videos for kids you need to check them out. Here is the link to this particular one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGVGwrM-vdo&t=4s
They are always engaging and a ‘go to’ for me. This video placed a crown on the parenthesis to remind the kids that the parenthesis is ‘king’ and always goes first. So….what was I to do of course…make a crown. I’ll be honest…first, I casually frantically asked every teacher on my wing if they had a crown ( preferably a nice solid metal or plastic one ). No luck…so of course I headed straight to who else but kindergarten. I mean hello…c’mon of course they would have crowns. No luck…so I made my own cheesy crown…it worked fine. I knew that I needed one and I had to have my parenthesis kids ( for our skit ) wear one as well.
This is what we came up with… ( oh P.S. no judging it happened to be Red Ribbon Week and a spirit day…team up against drugs ) that’s the reason for the jersey and black paint on my face.
As you can see above, I rocked wore the crown during the entire lesson and then I called kids up to hold numbers, multiplication signs and of course hold the all important parenthesis. As you can see the students holding the parenthesis were wearing the crowns to show that that part needed to be done first. Then we moved the parenthesis’ ( not sure how to make that plural ) LOL around different numbers to get our point across.
So, something like this:
3 x ( 4 x 2 ) =
( 3 x 4 ) x 2 =
It worked like a charm…even my struggling students were able to pick up on the concept. I love when I teach something like this and it sticks with everyone…that makes my teacher heart so very happy!
So, if you want to try this in your class all you need is:
It was super fun, memorable and easy to do, if you are teaching on it and finding your students having some trouble with it then you need to definitely get all ‘royal’ on your students and give this lesson a try! I’ve included a freebie just for you – you can grab it
{ here }
I hope this was helpful to you…as always,
happy teaching!
xo,
