Arithmetic Grade Five

Lesson Seven: Multiplication Review

It is important to be able to use multiplication to solve word story problems. This shows that you can recognize that multiplication can be used to solve problems. Think about this problem: 

   There were four lines of children. There were six children
   in each line. How many children were there in all?
We could represent this story problem with a picture like this:

We could actually draw pictures of children if we wanted to take a lot of time, but its easier just to draw little squares. We have four columns of squares with six squares in each row. Counting up the squares we get a total of 24 squares (with each square representing a single child).

We could also write the following number sentence for the story problem: 
 
    4 x 6 = 24

Here's another word story problem for you to think about: 


   There were four plates with donuts on them.
   There were eight donuts on each plate. 
   How many donuts were there in all?
We could make a picture like this to represent this story problem:

We draw four rows of squares with eight squares in each row. The four rows represent the plates. That makes a total of 32 donuts in all.

We could also write the following number sentence for the story problem: 
 
    4 x 8 = 32

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