We love doing hands-on math activities in our house and lately, those math activities involve Magna-Tiles. We've used the Magna-Tiles to explore symmetry, measure objects around the house, play dominoes, and practice tally marks. Now we're going to show you how to use them to learn multiplication. My five year old came up with this activity on his own and shocked me with his ability to multiply (that likely has something to do with that hypernumeracy of his). Regardless, it shocked me.
Teaching multiplication to kids is easy with this simple, no-prep math activity for kids.
This post contains affiliate links. And a big shout out to Valtech, the makers of Magna-Tiles for providing us with a 100 piece set of solid colors to play with.
How to Teach Multiplication to Kids Using Magna-Tiles
To use Magna-Tiles to learn about multiplication is really easy. We used only the squares from the 100 piece set. Since there are 50 squares, we can do multiplication problems that have an answer of 50 or less. So definitely lots of problems to solve!
Basically my son built a grid according to whatever the given problem was. Then he recorded his answer on a piece of paper. Here he is doing 7 x 3 by building a line of seven Magna-Tiles so that there would be seven columns. Then he adds additional rows until he gets to three rows.
Then simply count up the squares to get the answer! Easy!
Here's J demonstrating 10 X 2...
Why yes, it does equal 20! Good work, J!
J ended up doing a whole bunch of multiplication problems. The front and back of this paper were covered with problems. And he also added some commentary. Notice the "lots squares 24" and "30 big num" (the rest of the word "numbers" made it onto another piece of paper).
I did have a video to add to the post, but alas, it ended up blurry because I used the wrong setting (insert sad face here). And my attempts to recreate it were met with unhappy children. Oh well!
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Such a quick and easy math activity for learning about multiplication, right? This post is part of the A-Z Stem Series hosted by Little Bins for Little Hands. You can check out all the posts in this series here.
