This activity is part math, part art, making it much more enjoyable for my second grader. We have been talking about multiplication and division and he has noticed that numbers go in groups. These are called fact families. We watched this video to better explain the concept.
Then I made this page with fact family numbers. I did not group them together so that he had to figure them out. You can find a button to download this page below.
The next step is to cut out the numbers. He then started grouping them together. It made it easier to have them cut out so that he could move the numbers around.
Once he figured out the families, he used a piece of construction paper to draw a house for each fact family.
My son loves to put cute faces on things so this next part was mostly just to get him excited about finishing the activity. I printed off the sheet below that has cute faces and he cut some out to glue onto the numbers. He also used them as ideas and he drew on some faces with colored pencils. All the cutting and drawing has the bonus of working on his fine motor skills too!
I hope this can help some other parents and teachers out there. I think it really helped my son visualize and understand the relationship between multiplication, division and fact families.
