Acorn Arrays – for Building Number Facts

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

Scissors

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)

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 from Rainy Day Mum

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