How rectangles help us understand our times tables

Today we had a special visitor in our classroom again. She is a maths expert...ask anyone in Room 3! Mrs Butel works with schools as a Maths Advisor. Her job is to show students and teachers the most effective ways to learn maths, based on evidence-based research. Everyone loves working with Mrs Butel...but she makes us think and talk mathematically....and then prove everything we say.

Here we had to show FACTORS of a number...and the shapes were rectangles.   Kahn and Jack are show 4x1 as four rows of one; 2x2 as two rows of two and 1x4 as 1 row of four.

We made factors for numbers one to twelve.


Maddox and Luke had to go for our biggest number, which was a bit trickier. How many factors can you get for 12? They worked out later, when they looked at the photo of their earlier work, that they mixed up the four rows of three with the three rows of four.  The arrows fixed it though, once they proved that they were right to change it. Can you think of two more factors they could put in for  the number 12?

After we lined all the whiteboards up from one to twelve we could see all sorts of interesting patterns. In fact we discovered a pattern that was actually the PRIME numbers. (Another mathematical term we have learned.)

    Maddox is proving his findings to the group. The have to agree or disagree with him, but have to say why.

At the end of the lesson we looked at the factors we wrote on the board for each number, from one to twelve.  Can you see the patterns? What numbers have only one or two factors?

We talked about what we have discovered in the lesson, what we found interesting and surprising and then we wrote sticky notes for others to read.

Next week we will be doing more mulitplicative thinking...showing and proving our ideas using increasingly bigger numbers.