Mission Multiply: Our Multi-Digit Multiplication and Division Recap ✖️➗

Fifth Grade Families,

Our first big math unit of the year is in the books, and your fifth graders earned it. For the past three weeks we have been working on multiplication and division with multi-digit numbers, and yesterday the class took the unit exam.

What we did in class. We started every day with an estimation warm-up, rounding numbers to get a quick "about how much" before solving. For example, 48 x 21 is about 50 x 20, or 1,000, so if a student's answer comes out to 10,080 they know something went wrong. We built multiplication with area models before moving to the standard algorithm, and we tackled long division with our "Does McDonald's Serve Burgers" memory trick: Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring down.

Our favorite task. Students planned a field trip budget for 127 fifth graders: how many buses that seat 48, how many pizzas if everyone eats 3 slices, and what to do with the leftover slices. That last part is the heart of this unit, because a remainder means something different in every story. Sometimes you round up (you cannot order part of a bus), and sometimes you share it out.

How you can help at home. Multiplication facts still matter. A quick game of "fact tennis" in the car, where you volley problems back and forth, keeps those facts fast so students can focus on the bigger thinking.

Next up: decimals!

Mr. Green