Integrating Shapes and Multiplication

We have recently started a Shape and Space unit and I wanted to try and integrate multiplication into questions or tasks that I posed to my students. 

I thought about the idea of making a city using different shapes and different multiplication arrays. 

To start the lesson I showed students the city and then asked them to come up with questions that related to multiplication and shapes.  As always they always come up with much better questions than me.

"How many cubes are in each building?" (that was a very common one)

"What shapes are the buildings?"

"If every cube had two rooms, how many rooms would be in each building?"

"What building is the tallest?"

"If two people lived in every cube, how many people would live in the building?"

Starting a maths lesson by getting students to pose the questions is probably the most enjoyable part of the maths we do in class. It allows me to really see who is thinking mathematically. 

They then had to go off and find out how many cubes are in each building. As this was the start of our Shape and Space unit, we just talked about the shapes of the different buildings. 

The lesson after this. I gave students an opportunity to create their own city. I gave them a success criteria to work from. 

This task really gave the students are great chance to visualise and play with different groupings. 

Later this student used the rulers to level the sides of her building. This brought up the role of right angles.

Students communicating mathematically!

Great that kids are learning how multiplication and addition are often required to help solve problems.

It is always interesting to see what operations the kids come up with. More often than not how I what I would come up with. That confirms the importance of being flexible with numbers or in this case groups of numbers.