Fallin For Fact Families Freebie

Before we started really getting into division, we worked on fact families in my class. I started by reviewing what fact families are (relating to addition and subtraction). Then I threw out the big bad word.... inverse. I want my students to know the word inverse and use it. And they know it. Tell them something is a BIG word and they won't forget it. Once students understand that division was the inverse of multiplication and figured out how fact families could help them divide, we did a fun activity. Forgive me for not taking pictures, but my AP walked in during this lesson and I just didn't want to bust out the camera mid lesson to start taking pictures.

Since I have no pictures, I will do my best to explain how we used this in my class.

Each  pair of students got an acorn top that had 2 factors on it. They had to first figure out what their product was.

Taped around the room I had the bottom pieces to the acorns which had the products on them. Once the pairs figured out their product, they had to find it and tape their top to the bottom.

Since the lesson was more about fact families than it was knowing actual multiplication facts, and I was limited on times, the next thing we did was scoot through the room traveling from acorn to acorn and recording the numbers on our recording sheets.

Once that was done, we did one example writing fact families together and then students worked in their groups/pairs to complete the page, writing fact families for each set of numbers.

It was a quick way for students to make the connection between multiplication and division and even my lowest student was successful. So much so that he didn't even want to stop when it was time for lunch. He asked if he could take it out to recess to finish!

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