Week 4 Task 2: Real times tables

Today your mission is…

Fill times tables with personally meaningful examples. This task helps to develop fluency and applications of multiplication.

Ready, Set, Go

This activity scales up and down: you can spend five minutes, or five hours, or five years hunting for the elusive facts. Don’t worry about finishing it all in a day. Just as with any other collections, this one will grow and become more meaningful over time.

Go on a scavenger hunt for examples of multiplication in nature, designs, or stories. Prepare index cards or sticky notes, and a times table grid large enough to fit them. Every time you find an example, sketch or describe it, and put it in the right cell. Some combinations are easier to find than others, so you can have multiple cards in the same cell. Decide what to do about the symmetric times facts, like 2*5 and 5*2. Take photos of happy hunters with their finds and creations!

For an extra challenge, seek iconic examples, where objects always go with particular numbers. Hands and fingers always mean 2x5, and the chessboard is always 8x8.

If you are into arts, crafts, or engineering, make your collection beautiful. Go from a sketch to a full art piece. Compose your photos nicely. Design a complex Lego sculpture or Minecraft building. Turn a description of a situation into an engaging story. Make a poster, a collage, a gallery, or a diorama out of your collection.

By Sabdha C.

Your forum response

• What multiplication ideas do you see in this topic? What bridges connect this to your everyday life, sciences, and arts?
• Did you use this with kids or students? How did it go? What did they say and do? What questions did they ask?

How to help your child to get started

Where can you go hunting?

• On a field trip. Your yard, a park, a museum, a fire station, a zoo… Give each group of participants a camera to capture their finds. Invite them to point out multipliers they find with their hands or whole bodies for extra awesome photos.
• To your home. Find multiplication in toys, pets, decorations, books. Make mobiles or sculptures about multiplication.
• To a virtual world. Find and build multiplication in the universes people created, such as Minecraft, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and Harry Potter. Let kids pick destinations.
• To a box of construction toys and art materials. How many different ways can you show the same multiplication example with Legos? Can you paint it, sculpt it, fold it, cut it?
• Through history and ethnography. Check out what different times and cultures did for their multiplication, from playing dice to building abacuses.
• Into a trade. How do nurses, astronauts, musicians, or homesteaders use multiplication? You can interview a real tradesperson, or pretend-play about sci-fi, historical, or future professions, such as alchemists, Mars settlers, or time travelers.
• Into the imagination. Make up stories and art devoted to multiplication. Play “Imagine That!” by making silly changes to the world: a hand with fingers at the tips of fingers, a dog with eight legs, an alien planet where numbers only went up to three.

Frequently Asked Question

You frequently mention celebrating mistakes. But how to do it? And why? In life, making a mistake may lead to unfortunate or tragic consequences. Does celebrating mistakes mess up children’s respect for serious thinkers of the past?

You would not celebrate a mistake in building a bridge, or in getting the distance to Mars wrong and missing your landing window! However, there is a side of mathematics that is more whimsical and free. Mathematics can be not only about measuring this world where we live, but about making up other, fantastic worlds. In that, mathematics is closer to fairy tales, or science fiction, or fine arts where you can create rather freely. So when I talk about celebrating mistakes, I mean taking them from our world into one of those mathematical Wonderlands.

For example, my math circle kids kept confusing squares and cubes, or circles and spheres. But we played with it, and by now, they talk about three-dimensional squares - or even four- and five-dimensional! This road from mistakes to abstractions is a big part of the history of serious mathematics, from imaginary numbers to non-Euclidian geometries.

Words

Array, area, number line, set, combinations, symmetry, fractal, scale