What's an array and what do they teach us about multiplication? 

Last month, third graders launched into multiplication head-on, identifying all the places they have actually applied it. We looked at pictures of a grocery store to see how items are arranged on shelves, we counted sheets of stamps, we designed candy boxes, and guessed how many times larger objects were in comparison to one another. 

This week we explored square numbers and found some cool patterns - if the number of rows and the number of columns in the array are the same, then the array can look like a square. We also made skylines with arrays and used the distributive property to split the larger arrays into smaller arrays to help us calculate how large our skylines are.