When I was nearing the multiplication unit for my fourth graders I had started (as always) looking for new lesson ideas. As we got into the unit I had a couple students who kept missing steps. Every single time they would miss one or two steps and of course, get the entire thing wrong. It was so frustrating as a teacher because they had their facts right, it was the process. Sometimes it was simply not putting the place holder.
Once I realized this pattern I searched and googled and searched and googled for a good tool or Anchor Chart and could not find ANY! So I made my own! The kids really loved it and we posted it up for them to reference.
When trying to figure out the easiest way to do this I decided to use color coding. The brown numbers are the numbers already used in the step before. The red is the answer on the current step. For example on number 5 I circled 8 and 9 in red to show that was the current step, then wrote the answer, 78 in red. I used blue to highlight or spell out what the step was. For example, on number 1 I drew an arrow from the 4 and wrote "carry me" to remind students to carry (that is a HUGE problem for some). I also wrote out 7x7=49 to show, again, that was the only math problem they were working on in the first step.
When I introduced it I showed it to the class like this:
The student's that were having problems absolutely LOVED this and actually thanked me! I have noticed students referencing it from time to time and I have to say that their multi-step multiplication improved greatly!
Do you have any good tips? Visuals are the BEST but sometimes hard to think of, especially with multi-step math!
excellent! my very visual daughter needs this! thanks for sharing
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