Acorn Arrays – for Building Number Facts

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Recently my eldest has come home with some maths homework and one of the problems on the sets has been a number fact using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – similar to 1×3=3×1 is this true or false and he has sat puzzling over it not quite understanding what they are asking. So for this weeks 2nd Grade bloggers theme of Acorns we’ve got a FREE downloadable acorn printable that you can use in these Acorn Arrays to help develop some number facts around multiplication.

Materials Needed

Download and Print page 2 of the Acorn Sheet when you sign up for our Hands-on Activities News Letter or you could use real acorns if you have these available.

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Learning Objectives

• Solve problems involving multiplication using materials, arrays, repeated addition
• Show that multiplication of two numbers can be done in any order (commutative)

Preparation

Download and print the acorn sheet (page 2)

Join our Hands-on Activities Newsletter and get your Acorn Printables for FREE

Join our Weekly Hands-on Activities for Learning Newsletter and get these printable Acorns to use for Number Activities

Get your Acorn Printables and Join our Hands-on Learning Activities Newsletter

Please see our Data Protection and Privacy Policy for more information about how we collect and process your personal data

Cut up the acorns – 100 are provided for your use on page 2

Building Number Facts with Acorn Arrays

We are working on 2, 5, 10, 3, 4 and 8 times tables with my eldest – although in Year 2 he only needs to know 2, 5 and 10 he has mastered these as has memorised them and can apply to different situations without understanding the number facts behind them. Using the acorns, we’re able to build up the number fact knowledge for the 3 and 4 times tables.

I started off by laying out a single row of 3 acorns – and besides it, we wrote 1 x 3 = 3

Then on another piece of paper we laid out 3 rows of 1 acorn and we wrote 3 x 1 = 3.

We then repeated this for 2 rows of 3 acorns and 3 rows with 2 columns showing how the same number of acorns could be manipulated in the arrays to form the two different versions of the multiplication.

We worked through the different 3 times table and then progressed to the 4.

This is a great way for kinesthetic learners to understand that multiplication can happen in any order and also will help visual learners to remember the patterns.

More Acorn, Squirrel, Nut themed activities for 2nd-grade learning

Check out these other ideas for 2nd-grade learning from the team.

Acorn Arrays for Building Number Facts You are Here!

Acorn Addition with Hundreds Chart from Life Over C’s

Squirrels Copywork from Sallie Borrink Learning

Acorn Gratitude Banner from Creative Family Fun

How to Teach Vocabulary Words to a Hands-On Learner from Sugar Aunts

Cerys Parker

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Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, high school teacher and mum. Realising that life doesn't have to be put on hold and you don't just have to survive whilst the kids are young she shares ideas to inspire you to LIVE with the kids, with activities to do together, recipes to cook and enjoy and family travel to make memories to last a lifetime.

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