Arrays, Number Puzzles, and Factor Trees

This week my students are tackling a task I came upon from the Georgia Performance Standards web site resources. It caught my eye because my students need a LOT of work with the mathematical practices especially collaboration, communication, persistence, and reasoning. This task fit the bill for all of those skills while they practice factors, multiples, and factorization. Students work in small groups (we're working in pairs). They have three sheets of paper to share with rectangular arrays, factor trees with missing numbers, and puzzle cards. The goal is to identify the number of each representation and match them.

There are several entry points for this task - some easier than others. Most students wanted to tackle the word puzzle cards first but then realized that the other two sheets were much easier to do first and then use as clues for matching up to the word puzzles. There is a second group of cards for those that finish quickly - although no one in my two advanced classes finished yesterday. My other three
classes will begin this activity today.

Today we will finish up this activity, make posters of the matches, and present their findings with some discussion by the students to justify their answers.

For our math notebook, we will make a number puzzle of a mystery number for others to solve.

Here is the link to the file:
https://ccgpsmathematicsk-5.wikispaces.com/file/view/4-6_Arrays_Number_Puzzles.pdf