Course Sample for Our Multiplication Workshop Homeschool Math Course
Ocean Multiplication Workshop
You might think that multiplication is going to be a hard thing to learn, but you will be surprised how easy multiplication is. There is a lot of memorizing, but if you take your time, you’ll remember it just by doing it over and over again.
Multiplication is a very important part of arithmetic. You will need to know how to do it well to be able to learn many of the harder types of math you will need when you are older.
Multiplication is really a faster way of doing addition. You are probably saying, “What? I already know how to add. I learned that a long time ago.” That’s right, you did, and you can learn this too. Let’s look at multiplication and see how easy it will be.
We will start with something easy like 2 X 5. The X in the middle means you are going to multiply, and you read the problem, “two times five.” The two is called the multiplier and the 5 is called the multiplicand. Sometimes, people just call both of the numbers factors. The answer is called the product. Now, back to our problem. When you have a problem like 2 X 5, it means that you have two groups of five or that you are going to add two fives together. 2 X 5 is the same as 5 + 5. We know that 5 + 5 = 10, so we know that 2 X 5 = 10.
If we had a problem, like 3 X 5, we read it “three times five” and it means that we have three groups of five. So we are going to add three fives together. So, 5 + 5 + 5 = 15, and 3 X 5 = 15.
Okay, now you are probably thinking, “If that is all there is to multiplication, why can’t I just add, because I already know how to do that?” Well, the reason is that when you get to a problem like 12 X 12, or even 30 X 5, it would take a long time to add all those numbers together. Memorizing the multiplication tables makes it much faster so that even hard problems like 30 X 5 are easy and fast to do.
Now that we know why we want to learn to multiply and understand what multiplication is, let’s get started. The first thing to remember is that any number times 0 equals 0. That means that if you have a problem like 2 X 0, it equals 0, and 100 X 0 still equals 0. Do you know why? It’s because the first number tells us how many groups of the second number we are going to add together. If the first number is 2, it means we are going to add two groups of nothing together and if the first number is 100, it means that we are going to add one hundred groups of nothing together, so it always equals 0!
The next thing to remember is that 1 times any number equals the number you are multiplying. For example, if you have 1 X 2, it equals 2 because you are only adding one group of 2. If you are only adding one group of 2, you have to end up with the 2 you started with, and no more. If you have 1 X 50, it equals 50 because you are only adding one group of 50, and nothing else to it.
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