The purpose of this activity is for students to use the Co-Craft Questions math language routine to make sense of a multiplication situation before solving. Students are first asked to generate questions they could ask about part of a problem. Then, students are given the full problem and asked to solve it. The activity concludes with students reflecting on the representations they used. In this activity, students will need to see the full problem to solve. Before the lesson, record the problem and have it hidden until the appropriate time in the lesson or write it for all to see at that point during the activity.

This activity uses MLR5 Co-Craft Questions. Advances: writing, reading, representing.

• Display student work with different representations of the problem one at a time (drawings of equal groups, tape diagrams, and expressions). If no student writes an expression, write one for students to analyze.
• “How does each representation help us see what’s happening in the problem?”

The purpose of this activity is for students to use what they’ve learned about multiplication to solve and represent situations that involve equal groups. Students now have experience with multiple representations and have had the opportunity to choose which representation is most helpful to represent multiplication situations.

The Launch is an opportunity for students to share their experiences and ask questions about the objects to ensure each student has access to the context. If it is helpful, display images of the objects for students to reference.

• “Tell me about how you solved this problem.”
• “How does the problem involve equal groups?”

• For each problem, display different representations, one at a time.
• “How does this representation help us see what’s happening in the problem?” (We can see there are 4 groups for the 4 fields and 2 dots in each group for the 2 teams on each field. The diagram is split into 5 parts for the 5 bags, and each part has a 10 in it for the number of earrings.)
• “How could each representation help us solve the problem?” (Counting the dots. Counting by 10.)
• If needed, “What expression could we write to represent this situation?”