Times Town

This post is a follow up to yesterday's Trouble with Times. In thinking up different fun ways of practicing the main idea of multiplication -- making the same amount over and over -- I thought of building towers with wooden cubes. All of the towers would be the same size. It would be a Times Town!

Over the weekend we were at the Maple Syrup Festival at Touch of Nature, and one of the favorite activities there was petting the baby goats. So I reminded them that baby goats like to be high, and will climb up whatever they can. But a baby goat would just be super confused in Times Town, because all of the buildings are the exact same size! Nothing is the highest.

In Waldorf, each operation has a color which goes with the temperament of its gnome.

Green - addition - phlegmatic

Blue - subtraction - melancholic

Yellow - multiplication - sanguine

Red - division - choleric

Montessori has given colors to the four operations also but, unfortunately, the colors do not match up. The only one that is the same between the two methods is yellow for muliplication. So here I used this Montessori material:

Multiplication Equation and Products Box

To build Times Town, the first number (the multiplicand) is how many blocks high the tower is. The second number (the multiplier) is how many towers you'll build. After you've built the town, and a friend has checked your work, count how many blocks TOTAL you used. Then find that number in the box.

The little goat is from my Three Billy Goats Gruff set (WoodMetamorphosisUK on Etsy). Isn't he adorable?

You can practice reading the number sentence several ways. 2 times 4 is the same as 8. 2 four times is the same as 8. 4 groups of 2 is the same as 8. 2 x 4 is another way of saying 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 (and is the same as 8).

I know that in Waldorf the product and the equals sign are supposed to be placed at the start of the problem (working from the whole to the parts), but I actually think in this case that that way of writing the sentence feels more like division. Like the farmer having 12 cabbages and placing them into equal rows. Division is not what we are working on here! I feel 2 x 4 = 8 is fine.

Also...

I think this was a good way to repurpose an existing material that I had on my shelf into a story-based work, which I feel sufficiently "Waldorfizes" it. And children do need to get used to seeing the equals sign in more than one place. (Vertical problems, ie. column algorithms, are introduced in Grade 2).