Sunday, February 24, 2013

Multi digit Multiplication

“I’ve tried to incorporate movement as much as possible each day, and the students have responded. To quote a student of mine--This moving around stuff is cool!” — Tim McGovern, Reading Intervention Coordinator, Kemper Elementary School, Cortez, Colorado

This year I am teaching an Accelerated Math Class in 4th grade. This has been such a challenge and many of my students are willing to go the extra mile to learn and have fun while doing just that. I find as a teacher that math is one of my favorite places to add gestures. The students get really into it and it has showing to increase retention of skills in my classroom.

Multi digit multiplication is a skill that is taught in many ways. My students all gravitated to their own method, but many still wanted to know the traditional way. This brought up great discussion about how you move from one number to the next and multiply. Once you have your partial products then you add these together to form your product. In order to make this fun and visual we incorporated gestures and made a YouTube video for you so see!

In the video students describe how you multiply up first starting in the ones column and then multiply over. Once you have multiplied over then you add a zero. So students are moving their arms up and over then make an air zero. Then we move to the second number in the tens place on the bottom and this time you go over then up. Then you add (make an addition sign with your arms) then total (horizontal line with your arms).
SO the chant goes like this:
You go up then over then zero,
then you go over and up then add and total.

Watch the video and you will see how fun this was for all of us. The most rewarding was when I caught them out on the playground teaching other students and their homeroom teachers! Amazing!

YouTube 2 digit multiplication

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