Number sentences and word problems (15x15)

What are we solving?

When we work with written problems, we may need to go through them more than once, to find the information we need. Some things to think about are:

• Are we combining equal groups to get a total?
• Are we sharing, or 'dividing up' what we have?
• Are there any numbers, or pieces of information, that we actually don't need?

Let's see how we can turn our written problem into a number problem, like we did when we looked at numbers up to 10. This time though, we can build on that knowledge to work on numbers up to $15$15.

How do we solve them?

The next step is to have some strategies to solve the number problems. We can identify words or sentences that tell us if we need to multiply or divide, and then we can use strategies such as the distributive law of multiplication, and dividing by 10 to help us solve our problem.

In the first video, we'll find out what our multiplication number problem is. Then, when things change, we can use division to solve the new problem we are faced with.

Sharing it out

In our second video, we need to share things among groups, so we will start with division. Dividing by 10 helps us work out an estimate for our answer first, then we can use our 12 times tables to work towards our answer. We also see just how multiplication and division are linked in this video.