Slice It Up

(VDW pg 150)

Purpose: To illustrate the Distributive

Property
Procedure: Supply students with several
sheets of cm grid paper. Assign each pair of
students a product such as 6 8. (Products
can vary across the class or all be the same.)
The task is to find all of the different ways
to make a single slice through the rectangle.
For each slice students write an equation.
For a slice of one row of 8, students would
write 6 8 = (5 8) + (1 8). The
individual products can be written in the
arrays.

58

18

6 8 = (5 8) + (1 8)