Multiplication and Building Bricks

Hello All,
Fourth graders were quite successful with factors and number theory, which I’m sure will impact their work with multi-digit multiplication and division. I have already seen that students have a variety of strategies for multiplying, including using the distributive property, ratio tables, and the standard algorithm. We will be looking further at and refining our understandings of the distributive and associative property over the next couple of weeks.

In fifth grade, we are wrapping up our volume unit this week. Students explored with designing boxes for a brick factory that wants to package 12 cube shaped bricks. They needed to find all the possible designs. Many interesting ideas came up. How do we organize our work to be sure we have them all? How can factors of 12 help us? There were also some noticings about how many possible ways there were when the dimensions were all different or when there were 2 dimensions that were the same. See below for some samples of student work: