A “friendly” way of introducing factors to 4th grade students, is to have them work out factor pairs using only words they are familiar with. For example, Two numbers multiply to 24, and sum to 11. What are they? This question makes students work out all the factor pairs of 24: 1 x 24 2 …
It is important for educators to recognize that teaching the various procedures for finding GCF and LCM is not a standalone topic, but rather a foundation skill required for more advanced applications a few years down the road. More importantly, for higher grade teachers, when dealing with students with anxiety over algebraic manipulations and fractions operations, to identify if procedural fluency of finding GCF and LCM might be the root cause.
To introduce factors in a concrete and pictorial way, we can use 24 squares as an example. The following are all the possible rectangles made by arranging 24 squares. Hence, the factors of 24 are 1,2,3,4,6,8,12 and 24.
We received a question regarding the 2nd method of finding Greatest Common Factor by Prime Factorization in the Math In Focus Grade 4 materials. This example is from Math In Focus workbook 4A page 23, The “Method 2” mentioned above uses prime factorization as a procedure to find the GCF between two numbers. Procedure In each …
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