In Maths, Year 4 have been showing off their brilliant mathematical skills by demonstrating the distributive law.
The distributive law is when you multiply parts of a whole separately, then add the partial products together.
The distributive law is a helpful and efficient method to use when faced with multiplication questions that we don’t know fluently. It requires us to partition one of the factors into two parts.
7 x 13 may seem tricky initially but we can partition the 13 into 10 and 3. We can then multiply these parts separately and add them together to find our answer. Simple!
7 x 13 = 7 x 10 + 7 x 3
= 70 + 21
= 91
Help at home: ask your child to complete these multiplication questions using the distributive law…
- 8 x 16 =
- 4 x 14 =
- 3 x 17 =
- 5 x 18 =