Proportional Reasoning, Arrays, and Google Draw

Students use proportional reasoning to draw arrays with Google Draw. 

As students complete number cards as part of their start-of-the-year number warm-up, I find that the task to draw all factor pair arrays for each number using proportional reasoning to be challenging for students.

Yet, using Google draw makes the activity more reasonable, fun, and easier to refine or revise when necessary.

Also, as children review their cards with me, I can easily point out to them where corrections need to be made or where accurate proportional reasoning occurred.

For example, one child who was making the arrays for 32 had all the lengths correct relative to each other, but then all the widths were the same.  I could easily point out that the width of one looked the same size as the width of two and three.  The child easily understood, and went back to make the correction--a simple correction of moving the rectangle edges in and out to make each array proportional to the others.

Last year I gave students grids to make most arrays--a good first step for 4th grade, but this year at fifth drawing their own arrays with proportional reasoning is a great exercise.