I came up with a neat idea for a multiplication grid visual the other day, and stuck it up on Twitter where it has been doing the rounds with unprecedented alacrity:
I’ve loved reading comments and seeing how people are using the grids already, with fellow teachers, students and your own kids (I’m making one on A1 squared paper for my son this weekend – here’s one 3-year-old who will know what multiplication means before he learns his tables, if I can manage it!) A few of you came up with ideas for variations I could do, including starting the grid from the bottom-left to mimic a Cartesian coordinate grid, and emphasizing square numbers. I’ve also done one with the prime factorization of numbers on one side of the diagonal, which I quite like. I’ve put all the images together into a single pdf document to make it easier to access. It’s on my website at www.thechalkface.net/resources/true_scale_multiplication_grid.pdf:
I really like this visual and I’m going to try a few things myself. It reminded me of something I recently did when I was trying to teach my 5 year old how to do multiplication by counting tiles on a floor. Here is the story: https://3danim8.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/test-5-of-tableau-v…nal-speed/