Saturday, April 14, 2018

Mario Multiplication


Multiplication. Ugh.

When I got around to teaching two-digit times two-digit multiplication this year, I was dreading it. Hardcore.

Looking back at past years, one of the biggest problems I had was when we moved into the process of actually multiplying the two numbers. The students would go through the process with me just great, but then they would look for shortcuts when they went to do it on their own. I wanted them to remember that there were three steps: multiply the ones, multiply the tens, then add them together. This reminded me of the three laps in a Mario Kart race, so my room transformation was born!

This year, I decided I needed to come up with a different way to teach this. Now, I want to reinforce that I surrounded this specific lesson with exploratory activities as well. This lesson does focus on the process. 

I was brave enough to decide that this room transformation would be done during my observation, so I do not have a ton of pictures. However, it went great! Several of my students had never even had an opportunity to play a Wii, so this was a cool experience for them.

I bought several table clothes and some racing decorations at Hobby Lobby. There are a ton of things I would have added from Amazon, but I was trying to keep it cheap and it was a bit last minute, so I found things I didn't need to order.



Most of my time went into the PowerPoint I was using. I created a step by step animated slide show with practice problems that I used to go over the three steps. These were pretty basic problems, but I really focused on how it is like three laps, and of course I made sure the slide show was themed to match. I did have the students follow along on whiteboards, but I don't know that I'd do that again, at least not for the first few problems.



My biggest undertaking, aside from the PowerPoint was the cars. Now, I did only have 9 students in my classroom for this lesson, however, you could easily add some cars (they really didn't take, TOO long) or just rotate the kids that get to sit in them.

After the PowerPoint, we did practice problems while we played Mario Kart. The students would race a lap, then do the first "lap" or step of the problem. Then, they would do another lap and another step. We just paused the game after the first person started the next lap each time.


At the end of the lesson, we did some individual practice problems and I just reinforced the idea that there were three steps. If I would have changed anything, I would just add some higher level thinking in some way, possibly through the practice at the end.

This was so much fun and I really think having something to connect the problems with made this tricky multiplication much easier for my students to handle!

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