Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Multiplication the colorful way

One of my children does not consider math her gift. :-) We have been working on 2 digit and 3 digit multiplication, and this has been extremely challenging for her. She understood the concept of multiplication, but it seemed she could not remember how to do the algorithm, or the order of when to multiply. She would get stuck in the middle and was not sure what to do next.
To me this was an interesting problem. I wondered if color coding the problem would help her. So the picture below shows what we did. After a few weeks, she was able to solve the algorithm without the colors. I considered this great progress!


Each number in the second row of the multiplication problem is circled a different color. The lines that she writes the number on after multiply each number is the same color as the number that is being multiplied. This has helped her know where she is in each problem. We used Crayola erasable crayons.








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