Factors and Multiples

The students in my fourth grade classroom have been taught factors prior to this lesson. I started the lesson by writing the term "factor" on the board to activate their prior knowledge. I had students discuss what they recall about this term from previous chapters. I took various answers from my students. I then wrote "pairs" next to factor to make the term "factor pairs." Again, I asked my students to discuss what they knew about this term. "Factor pairs are two factors multipled to gind a product" ex. 3 x 4 = 12, 3 and 4 are a factor pair. I told the class that today they would be factoring ninjas! I got this idea from Pinterest and the kids loved it!

I modeled two ways to find all the factors of whole numbers; factor bugs and factoring rainbows. Students must know their multiplication facts in order to understand this concept. I tell my students all the time that math will become easier

as soon you know your mulitplication facts! I gave them worksheets with blank templates of factoring rainbows and factor bugs and guided them through factoring whole numbers. They did not have to do both the factoring rainbow and the factor bugs, they got to decide which one worked best for them. Every time we factored a number we would get our ninja hands up and chop up the product! My school uses the My Math

program books. After I felt that the class was understanding the concept of finding factor pairs, I had them open up their books to complete the independent practice.

To get the kids out of their seats, I told them to complete numbers 1-5. When everyone had finished those problems, I told them all to SCOOT! The students knew this meant to find someone else's seat to sit in. I would go over one problem and the students would check the paper of whose seat they were at. I would do this for those five questions to get the kids moving around and to mix things up for them.

Along with teaching factoring, I taught multiples as well. I told my students they would be multiple monsters (another idea I had gotten from Pinterst)! When finding multiples, you are making the number bigger! So I had my students get out of their chairs and squat down on the ground. I would say, "Right now we are the number two. But we are going to grow bigger by two to find our multiples!" We went from 2 to 4, 6, 8, 10, 12... Each time we created a new multiple we would grow bigger and bigger and become as big as we could into multiple monsters! This helped them remember the difference between finding factor pairs and finding multiples; with multiples the numbers got bigger and with factor pairs they were chopping up the products. The multiple monster was a way of showing the students that they could skip count to find multiples. I also showed them that they could divide to find a multiple as well. I like to show my students multiple ways to find an answer because they all learn differently and I want to help them find which way works best for them!