This is a great activity for visual learners! Use patterns to teach skip counting. Any other ideas about how this could be used?
skip-counting-math-worksheet from Kids Activities Blog
Also check out vi-hart on YouTube
Tag Archives: skip counting
Awesome Factors and Multiples Math Lesson
I recently taught a great math lesson and thought I was would share it with you. Let me know what your think!
Materials:
– iPad or device for Apps
– Apps: FactorSamurai & MiddleSchoolMath HD
– projector or AppleTV (something to connect iPad to projector)
– worksheet or workbook
Extension:
– Flocabulary (LCM/ GCF)
– factor tiles
Lesson Plan:
1. Begin with a quick brainstorm about multiples and factors. What are they? Where are they useful? How can our understanding of multiples help with factoring and visaversa?
2. What challenges prevent us from understanding of multiples (example: not memorizing multiplication table; difficulty counting on, etc).
3. Help students visualize multiples and factors. Visual tools for multiples: VennDiagram or 100’s chart. Visual tools for factors: factor rainbow or factor tree.
4. Hand out worksheet or workbooks. Help students to visualize problems (work on the board to guide students through the first questions).
5. At this point in the lesson, many students may feel frustration at not understanding multiples or factors. Typical areas of difficulty are multiplication, skip counting and prime/composites…
SOLUTION to frustration: have some fun!
6. Hook up the iPad/device to projector. Begin to play FactorSamurai. Tell students that you only a Grasshopper but really want to become Apprentice and need their help. Students will immediately want to play. Ask them to watch and try to figure out the pattern. Once students have figured out the pattern, allow several students to try and beat your high score.
7. Soon students should start to see the pattern, even the one’s that were not so sure before. They understand that (yes, this is exactly like fruit ninja!), they are trying to break the numbers into their factors. But you can’t break a prime!
DID YOU KNOW: factor comes from the Latin word “done”. Kind of makes sense!
8. Next, demonstrate the game “sorting multiples” on MiddleSchoolMathHD. Again, ask students to look for the pattern before allowing them to play. The crabs should be sorted into three bins: numbers that 2 goes into, 3, or both, for example. Soon, students should start to see another pattern: some numbers have “common multiples”
9. Finally, students will return to their worksheet. Ask students to explain how the game is like the worksheet. This will be their ticket out the door.
Hint: factors are what you multiply to get a number. So the App FactorSamurai actually asks players to slice the end product (multiple) into factors. For example, two times two is four. Four is a multiple of two; two is a factor of four.
Hint: multiples are what you get after your multiply.
Extension Lesson:
10. Students watch flocabulary “LCM and GCF”, completing the fill-in0the-blank worksheet
11. debrief on the difference between multiples and factors.
12. Allow students to use factor tiles to visualize how different numbers can be be broken up in various ways. For example: 1×12, 3×4 or 2×6
Links:
factor and multiple classroom game
explanation of factors and multiples
Happy Teaching!
Multiple Intelligences in the Everyday Classroom 