Pretzels! Pretzels! Pretzels! How many?.mov

Direct Instruction

The learning intention for this lesson is for my class to gain a deeper understanding of multiplication concepts. Particularly, why we multiply instead of using addition. This lesson is a rich task exploring concepts around estimating, equal sharing and division, multiplication and skip counting as well as partitioning numbers to help us solve the problem.

Extended Lesson Plan

Reflection

This lesson (as many lessons with food do), had great levels of engagement from all the students in my class. What I feel was very successful about it, is that all students, no matter their ability in Mathematics, were counting and actively participating in solving the problem.

I had my more able students, who were able to follow the concepts of splitting and combining numbers, asking if we could repeat the lesson because they enjoyed it so much. My students are loving learning their times tables with concrete materials, and are practising their Times Tables test on a daily basis, using abaci, cups and counters and hundreds boards to help them.

Things to note

This lesson was a little over 45 minutes long. In order to cut the video down to a watchable size, I haven't actually included the final answer in the video above. If you want to see how we worked it out in the end, there is another 2 minutes of video you can watch here. (Apologies about the cut off head.)

and the answer is...?.mov