Lower School Classroom Chronicle

Third graders build on their multiplication skills through tactile learning with cube trains. Pairs of students practice People Power Skills like “taking turns” so that both friends have a turn to build the train, and “stepping down” so that both friends have the opportunity to do their own thinking and noticing of the pattern without being given the answer. The goal: to recognize multiples of the numbers 2-12.

Students are instructed to work as a team to create a unifix cube train of ten groups of their assigned number by attaching cubes of their number in an alternating color pattern to be able to clearly see groupings of that number. After assembling their train, students practice skip counting by their number by creating a model of their train in their math journals (see photo above). At the end of the lesson, students are grouped by similar numbers (i.e. 2, 4, 6 together, 5 and 10s together, and 3, 6, 9 together) so they might compare trains by looking for common multiples within their trains.