What Is An Array In Math – I love learning about blocks because they are so visual and make for fun rectangular block activities and exercises! I love math stations and centers, so I’d love to share some of my repeat layouts and addition ideas with you! I hope you learn some fun new math teaching strategies that you can implement in your classroom!
One of my favorite things about teaching math is paint! Seriously! A great way to practice blocks and repeat additions is to paint them with a cotton ball. I also like to use cotton swabs to paint ten frames that I talked about in my big blog post on understanding construction numbers. Math in 2nd and 3rd grade will be pretty tough, so the more hands-on and fun it is, the better! Maths will get a lot more “papery” as they get older, so they’ll be really happy when you break out the paint!
What Is An Array In Math
Have your students paint the blocks in ROYGBIV into little grids to make bows! Super cute, right?? Like I said, I love painting! When painting with a cotton pad, you hardly use it, so it’s nice and cheap.
Miss Giraffe’s Class: How To Teach Arrays
I recommend using cubes to teach blocks or to help elementary students. The converging cubes show WHAT repeated addition really is because they connect in sets.
The cubes help them a lot to see that 3 x 4 4 repeats 3 times. Give them a task (3×4) and ask them to build it with cubes at your small group table. Then ask them to say “Here are 3 sets of 4 or 4 + 4 + 4 is 12” or however you want them to represent it. Big bonus points to the teacher for letting them write on the board like this with a dry erase marker, but they can take it to a dry erase board and write on it too!
Another great way to earn great teacher bonus points is with FOOD! Food is the ultimate motivator for learning, it really is…especially when food is the cookie!
All you need for a cookie tray block is mini chocolate cookies and a mounting plate! With lots of practice, give them a stack of cookies and put the recording sheet in a sheet protector. Build several blocks and each time fill in the bottom with a dry erase marker on the small group table. When everything is ready, it’s COOKIE TIME! It’s a great activity with 100% participation, let me tell you. Plus, you get to eat cookies (and without giving birth! You’re definitely the best teacher ever now – you teach with cookies for god’s sake, you deserve those cookies) and it’s a win-win for everyone. 🙂
Hands On Multiplication Review Activities And Games
Speaking of baking and such, another great way to teach blocks is to practice visual representation with mini muffin tins and pom pom balls! Have students take a card (ex: 4×4) and fill their mini muffin trays with pom pom balls to make them.
You can find a mini muffin tray in any kitchen supply store. I love this activity because they are hands-on, colorful, and really help solidify a concept.
Another way to practice blocks is with dough! You remember how I used dough to learn fractions.. I think it can be used to teach so many math concepts, whether in 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, whatever! They will be so excited to play with it, as they have probably long considered it a ‘toddler’. They’re still little kids, just in a bigger body!
Ask students to take a card and roll the dough into small balls to build it. So simple, but so much fun and a great way to practice. As an additional exercise, you can ask them to write the repeated addition form on a board or piece of paper!
Understanding Array. Have Fun With Arrays
So if you haven’t gotten enough good points with your students, break out MORE food! This is an easy way to practice using colorful cereals! Ask students to make blocks of cereal. It’s your decision to stick it or eat it!
I think it’s important that they can match the visual representation of an array with the representation of multiplication and addition over and over again, so I made some puzzles to practice this! I write puzzles for almost every math concept, so you should have known a puzzle was coming… 🙂
For this answer, the students match the 3 pieces to each block and write it down on their recording sheet. This helps bring together all the ways to visualize an array in your mind, and it’s also great practice for writing.
I also have matching cards you’ve seen for small group teaching. It can easily be a centerpiece if they match the types. I made a recording sheet with them in case you want to use it as a stand-alone center after working with the cards in small groups.
Creating Equations From Arrays Worksheet
Another game I like to play with these is MEMORY! Give students as many matching cards in TWO shapes as they can. It is important that you only add 2 types of representation to each game, otherwise the 3rd will never match. So let’s say you choose the picture representation (bees) and the number (6), leaving the 3×2 card so that every card has a match. Ask them to work together and put all the cards face down and take turns turning over 2… if they match, they keep it. If not, they put them back where they got them and it’s their partner’s turn. Continue playing until the math station times out or all the cards are taken. Easy and fun!
Another fun activity you can do is make blocks with googly eyes!! This is perfect if you’re teaching during Halloween, but it’s really fun and appropriate any time of the year! For this craft, students need googly eyes and a piece of construction paper—that’s it! Ask them to line up with their sarcastic eyes and write their poem.
Instead of “math student, math student” you can write their name (“Jayden, Jayden, what do you see?”), which makes a great bulletin board to show off your math learning!
I found my eyes and a lot of other supplies at the dollar store, like the nail stickers that people usually use at yard sales! The package had just over 300 circle stickers for just $1, so this is an inexpensive “craft” activity.
How To Teach Arrays
You can ask students to use bingo markers to stamp the blocks. They love bingo tokens! I don’t recommend buying them at the dollar store though – the ones you find there are too wet and puddles, not drips. Many of these sites are free, but beware!
BUT these inexpensive inspection kits are great dollar store finds. Of course, they’re only a dollar, and their tenderness is actually perfect because they’re folded into quarters, so it’s super easy to divide them into four 4×4 boards to build blocks for practice! It’s 8×8, so 64 squares in total, so you can divide it into 4 mini 4×4 boards for basic blocks OR leave them together to practice larger blocks. You can use absolutely anything to build blocks. I love seasonal erasers – you can match them to any season/holiday/theme. Owls now for autumn! 🙂 I always grab the 60 erasers for $1 when I see them for math manipulatives!
Ok, I also like to make little books for all math and literacy concepts. Books are great because they are fun for students to make and, unlike worksheets, they keep! They take it home and show it, read it again, love it. Books are a great way to review and present what you’ve learned.
This little book is the perfect little introduction. Each page tells them what block to draw and then describes the addition over and over again. The book is 8 pages long (each page is a half page as shown), including the cover, so it uses 7 different layouts. You can easily create pages to distinguish struggling students.
Rs2 Level B, Multiplication As Arrays
Another book I enjoy making are my 3-page picks. These are a book but also a sorting activity and are for many different math and literacy concepts in my TpT store. All the top pages (3) are what they are sorted under.
So, under the 2×2 wing on the next page, I would put image representations corresponding to the given block under it. Then they put the next 2×2 image on the page, and so on. 15 image representations must be arranged under each block