Lesson 11

The purpose of this lesson is for students to explore connections between area and the multiplication table.

This lesson introduces students to the multiplication table as a way to organize and find products of two whole-number factors (up to 10). Students begin by marking rectangles on blank multiplication tables, always starting from the upper left corner, and finding their areas. They see that the area of each rectangle is the product of the numbers at the right and bottom boundaries of the rectangle.

Through repeated reasoning, students see that finding the value of each cell in the table is like finding the area of a rectangle whose side lengths are a number from the top of the table and one from the left. Along the way, students notice patterns in the table and make use of them to complete the rest of the table (MP8).

This lesson is optional because it gives students more time to take a deeper look at the relationship between multiplication and area, and make addition connections.

Which multiplication facts did students seem most confident in as they found products in the multiplication table? For ones they did not know right away, what strategy did they go to?