Lesson: Wild and Wacky Elections

Play the video “So You Want to Be President?” Then, before or after reading the article, spark a discussion based on the following questions:

• What qualities do you think a presidential candidate should have?
  
• Why is ballot counting important to Election Day?
• How many years is a president’s term? Would you change this? Why or why not?

• Play the math video “Multiplication Diagrams.”
• Draw as many arrays as you can to show the product 12. Allow students to share their models with the class.
• Write a multiplication expression to match each of your models.
• The two numbers in your expression represent your factors. We can also call these two numbers a factor pair.
• Factor pairs follow the Commutative Property. So, the factors 2 and 6 represent both 2 × 6 and 6 × 2.
• How many factor pairs are there for 12? (3 factor pairs) What are they? (1 and 12, 2 and 6, 3 and 4)
• We can use a T-chart to help us organize factor pairs for different products.

• What do you notice about the T-chart? (Answers will vary. Possible answers: 18 has 3 factors pairs, 18 has 6 factors, the factors are listed in ascending order.)
• What factor will all numbers have in common? Why? (1, because every number can be multiplied by 1 and itself)
• Why do you think the numbers in each column are listed from lowest to highest? (Answers will vary.)

Have students complete problems 1 through 3 on pages 8 and 9 of the article.

Skills Sheets: Level Down: Missing Factors (4.OA.B.4) | On Level: Factor Pairs Using T-Charts (4.OA.B.4) | Level Up: Understanding Multiples (4.OA.B.4)

SEL (Social-emotional learning activity/prompt): During national elections, candidates often have different ideas on how to solve the country’s problems. Discuss the issues of concern for people in your community. Then have students write a letter to one of their congressional representatives in response to the following question: What’s an issue that your community is facing today, and what can your representative do to help?

Dynamath@Home: Have students use items such as cereal, coins, or Lego bricks to make arrays to determine the factor pairs for the following numbers: 20, 42, and 75. Then have them write observations about these numbers, their
factor pairs, or any patterns they noticed.