Minds On
Lunch party
A group of friends were getting together to have lunch. One friend brought 4 plates filled with equal amounts of carrot sticks and celery sticks. How many carrot sticks and celery sticks might be on each plate? Each plate has to have the same number of vegetables on them. How many carrot sticks and celery sticks were brought to the lunch altogether?
What you did is create groups to multiply.
Multiplication involves repeated equal groups, so one of the numbers you gave refers to the number of objects in a group, and the other number refers to the number of groups. Now we are going to look at different groups of objects and create a multiplication equation for them.
Let’s explore the following picture! There are two circles with three dots in each.
- How many groups of dots are there?
- How many dots in each group?
- What would our answer be altogether? How did you find this out?
When we are multiplying, we are doing repeated addition. We would write 3 + 3 = 6.
Examine the following picture where we have three groups with two dots in each group.
How many groups of dots are there?
- How many dots in each group?
- How many dots are there altogether? How did you find this out?
- What will our repeated addition look like for this picture?
Our last picture shows us three groups with 3 dots in each.
How many groups of dots are there?
- How many dots in each group?
- How many dots are there altogether? How did you find this out?
- What will our repeated addition look like for this picture?
When we multiply, we use the number of groups, multiplied (×) by, the number of objects in each group. For example, here we would write: 3 × 3 = 9.
